The Fighting Shepherdess

Katie Prentice grows up at the Sand Coulee roadhouse in Wyoming, a place her mother runs and the surrounding country despises. When a trapper named Pete Mullendore corners her, she flees to Mormon Joe, an educated sheepherder who takes her in and teaches her the trade. Then Joe is found murdered. Kate had quarreled with him over money, she knew how to set a trap-gun, and his will left her everything. The coroner’s jury finds too little evidence to hold her, and the town of Prouty convicts her anyway. She runs sheep in cattle country under that shadow and builds a herd big enough to be called the Sheep Queen, which settles nothing. Lockhart had lived in Wyoming since 1904, and the sheep-versus-cattle hatred here was current events, not backdrop. First National filmed it in 1920 with Anita Stewart.