The Daughters of Joshua Cabe (1972)

In Colton, Wyoming, Joshua Cabe and his lifelong pal and sidekick Bitterroot have worked their homestead together. Joshua's wife Martha had died in 1867 and their three grown daughters have since moved to St. Louis. Joshua Cabe controls the valley but his rival neighbor, Amos Wetherall had wanted for years to take control of the valley himself. A new homestead law takes Joshua by surprise. It opens the whole valley to any settler who can file a land claim by a due date. The law allows any settler to claim 2 sections for himself and 2 sections for any of his kin. Old timers have the right to pick their sections first. This is good news for Wetherall who has three sons on his land but it's bad news for Joshua whose daughters are away. In panic, Joshua travels to St. Louis to find his daughters and persuade them to return to Wyoming in order to help him file several land claims that would allow him to keep his valley homestead intact. However, one of his daughters is a nun working in a hospital. She tells Joshua that his other two daughters are married in New York. In desperation, Joshua 'adopts' three unknown young women, Charity, Mae and Ada, to be his daughters. One is a paroled prison inmate, the other is a prostitute abused by her pimp and the third one is a pickpocket thief. The young women take a liking to the old man and empathize with his case. They also want a change in life style, a new clean start far away from St. Louis. They agree to be 'adopted' by Joshua and to file land claims as his kin. There is only one catch - the homestead law stipulates that anyone filing a land claim has to live on the claimed land for a year at least. Will these city women be able to live the hard life of a homesteader in the isolated wilderness of the Wyoming territory ? Rival neighbor Wetherall and his mischievous sons, Blue, Cole and Deke, are surely likely to try to sabotage Joshua Cabe's efforts and dissuade his 'adopted' daughters from remaining in Colton.