Larry Finley
Western based on the novel by Marilyn Durham, in which a proper Victorian lady on the run from her troubled marriage falls in with a frontier outlaw gang, and falls in love with the head bandit who's running from a secret of his own.
Teenager Ben Mockridge feels life in a Wild West farm town has nothing better to offer then horse-cart racing with other hicks, so he naively begs cattle company owner Frank Culpepper to engage him as youngest cowboy for a long cattle trail to a fort, his mother barely notices. Ben doesn't even seem to get it when he's told to report as 'little Mary' to the old cook, whose words cowboy is something you do only if you have nothing better gradually become clear. Instead of an exciting heroic macho life, it's endless hard work, dumb chores and embarrassment, even getting literally caught with his pants down, robbed of his horse, witnessing unpunished crimes...
When his cattlemen abandon him for the gold fields, rancher Wil Andersen is forced to take on a collection of young boys as his cowboys in order to get his herd to market in time to avoid financial disaster. The boys learn to do a man's job under Andersen's tutelage; however, neither Andersen nor the boys know that a gang of cattle thieves is stalking them.
A man tricked into enlisting in the Confederate army is later thrown into a hellish stockade on desertion charges. He eventually breaks out of the prison camp, reunites with his old partner and sets out to kill the man who was responsible for his being in the camp in the first place. However, after accidentally killing a Confederate officer, he finds himself pursued by a gang of vicious bounty hunters intent on collecting the reward put up by the dead officer's widow.
A senator, who became famous for killing a notorious outlaw, returns for the funeral of an old friend and tells the truth about his deed.
Confederate veteran Jeff Waring arrives in Independence, Missouri shortly after the Civil War, intending never again to use a gun. He finds that rancher Artemus Taylor and his henchmen are forcing out the settlers in order to claim their land for the incoming railroad.
