Broken Trail is a 2006 Western television miniseries directed by Walter Hill and starring Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church.

[1] Written by Alan Geoffrion, who also wrote the novel,[2] the story is about an aging cowboy and his nephew who transport 500 horses from Oregon to Wyoming to sell them to the British Army.

Along the way, their simple horse drive is complicated when they rescue five Chinese girls from a slave trader, saving them from a life of prostitution and indentured servitude.

[3] Part 1 In San Francisco in 1898, countless Chinese girls are sold into slavery and brought to the American West to live as prostitutes among the miners and railway workers.

Billy Fender (James Russo) arrives in San Francisco and purchases five Chinese girls to be sold as prostitutes in Idaho.

Uncomfortable with her unfair decision, and wanting to reconnect with his nephew, Prent tells him about his plan to transport 500 horses from Oregon to Sheridan, Wyoming, where he will sell them to the British Army.

Unable to bridge the language gap, Prent assigns numbers to the girls, naming Ghee Moon (Jadyn Wong) #1, Mai Ling (Caroline Chan) #2, Sun Fu (Gwendoline Yeo) #3, Ye Fung (Olivia Cheng) #4, and Ging Wa (Valerie Tian) #5.

She offers to pay Ed to bring the girls back to her, but he is more interested in abusing one of Kate's former prostitutes, Nola Johns (Greta Scacchi).

Lung Hay left his wife in China many years ago to follow the promise of gold in America.

Prent and Nola begin spending more time together, but Prent—whose memory of his dead wife and seven-year-old daughter still haunt him—is cautious about his feelings for her.

Prent and his outfit continue east through Wyoming, encountering a band of Crow Indians who demand payment to pass through their land.

In the ensuing gun battle, Ed takes Nola, Lung Hay, and the girls hostage, forcing Prent to throw down his rifle.

Just as Ed prepares to torture and kill Prent, the aging cowboy yells out an Indian cry as a warning to Tom, who has just arrived back at the ranch.

She hugs Tom and boards the stage, but at the last minute, overwhelmed by feelings of love for the young cowboy, steps down with her bags.

Time passes and then, in 1912 at Siam Bend on the Snake River in Wyoming, Prent is fly fishing on his ranch when his longtime friend Lung Hay approaches with a letter from Nola, who has been corresponding with him for fourteen years.

She writes that the girls are doing fine, that she is pleased with the name of the ranch (a reference to Prent's earlier statement to her that he would never be the king of Siam), and that her love for him has never wavered.

It is stated that Ging Wa (#5) studied medicine at Stanford University and moved to China with Ghee Moon (#1) to start a hospital but they were lost in Mao Zedong's revolution.

The epilogue closes by stating that Nola Johns was buried at Siam Bend on the Snake River and that Prent rests at her side.

Robert Duvall developed the project with Alan Geoffrion then took it to Walter Hill, with whom he had made Geronimo: An American Legend (1993).

It was originally meant to be a feature but then was felt it might be easier to raise funds as a TV mini series, so it was taken to AMC.

Walter Hill admitted there were "some difficult moments" arising out of changing the story from a film to a mini series.

We had to because it was going off in the wrong direction," said Duvall, explaining that the altered script had a new and, to him, unwarranted emphasis on "gunfights" and other "very obvious, melodramatic" plot devices.

"[7] The miniseries was filmed from August 15 to October 18, 2005, in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, about an hour's drive from Calgary, Alberta.

The fact that these are all tiny characters caught up in a bad landscape may not sound very controversial but when you're dealing with a venue like the small screen that is contrary to what a lot of guys perceive to be good form.

In his review in DVD Talk, Scott Weinberg called the film "a warm-hearted and gorgeous-looking piece of big-time Western-style filmmaking."

Duvall's clearly having one last hurrah on horseback, Walter Hill does some of his very best work in years, and Tom Church makes a very strong case for his place in the genre.

[11]In his review for NPR, David Bianculli wrote that "the series delivers great performances and rough-edged realism—you can almost smell the leather.

"[12] In her review in The New York Times, Alessandra Stanley wrote that the film "is much more in the debt of Lonesome Dove, probably a little too much, since it too cannot live up to that legendary epic."