The Broken Trail - Robert Duvall mini-series
 

Anyone ever see this one? Made in 2006, it has Duvall driving some horses to Wyoming in the late 1890s when he encounters 5 Chinese girls being taken to a brothel in an Idaho mining town.

I saw the second half of it on IFC a couple times so I investe $10 in a DVD from e-Bay. Great story. Highly recomended. Mature theme, 18 years and up probably.

At the end, they add tidbits that make you wonder if it was based on a true story. Probably not but some aspects based on actual events.

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=18&art_id=21470&sid=8549958&con_type=3

Two of the bad guys - Fender and Big Ears - are about the meanest looking bad guys I can recall in a movie. Both guys look sorta big and tough in other photos, but they invest a believable amount of menace in these roles.

Yes, I saw it in the theater when it came out. Good film, apparently based on actual events. Even a link to my homeland in it which surprised me. Comes up briefly in conversation when they were discussing the price of the herd. My paternal grandfather went to SA as a Brit soldier to fight the boers.

- Peter,

It's a good one. Not quite as good as the original Lonesome Dove, but up there pretty close.

Oh, I was under the impression it was made for TV. Good enough to be a theater release - I don't recall it coming out but I frequently don't watch that scene too close.

Yeah, that reference to the 'price of horse-flesh' on the worldwide market was interesting. Imagine the journey those horses made: Oregon to Wyoming, incredible country (I wonder if horses dig new vistas, the way I do); then shipped by rail to some East Coast port; then transported by steamer to S. Africa, followed by who knows what adventures, and I use the term loosely. I mean, imagine being a horse in a war.

I read one review on Broken Trail and they mentioned how it was almost hard to believe that it had been 17 years since Lonesome Dove came out. I still haven't finished watching that one. Watched the first half with a friend. Quite a film.

They've got a shot of a sort of earthen ramp/pass through some part of the mountains they refer to as "The Whale's Back" in Big Horn County Wyoming. Amazing shot, they show some footage purporting to be driving horses over it, seems real. Looks to be 35 to 40 degrees steep, perhaps 45 in spots.

That'll get you up in the marnin', laddy buck.

I dig the Rockies, I like the Cascades in WA state pretty well too. I did a little horse riding in the back country in Okanogan county WA and it is some kind of experience. One foggy morning, as the fog broke, I could see that we'd been high up a hill, doing a slow descent, with an open view of the valley for some time. I just hadn't known it til the fog broke.

Indeed. I recall my father telling me some stories that my grandfather had told him (he died years before I was born so I never knew him). It's by the narrowest of margins that I exist as he came perilously close to death on more than one occasion, both from sickness and enemy action. I recall one story when he was riding a horse, despite being in the infantry (was sent by an officer to a nearby villiage to buy bread) and wonder if it might have been one of the horses in this story.

- Peter.

I imagine it would amaze us if we knew of the adventures that our various ancestors went through, narrowly escaping death, after which they contributed to our own gene pool.

I was giving my dad grief about some BS once and he came back with "What? Do you realize that I spent 9 months in a foxhole keeping a jap from climbing down my neck?"

Undoubtedly. I wish I had compiled all the stories my father and his siblings had from their expriences. I have an amazing letter from one of my uncles who was a fighter pilot with the SAAF and then RAF in North Africa and Burma during WWII. Makes for interesting reading.

- Peter.