In the novel, 14-year-old Mattie Ross’s father is murdered in Fort Smith by hired hand Tom Chaney ( “There is trash for you,” Mattie says). Reviews were spectacular: “a small masterpiece of American humor” (Memphis, Tennessee’s Commercial Appeal) “a new kind of Western, a horse opera with a difference” ( Newsday) “as touching as it is irreverently amusing” ( New York Times) and “speaks to every American who can read” ( Washington Post). In 1968, Simon & Schuster published True Grit, the 34-year-old ex-Arkansas newspaper journalist’s second novel. While on the trail of the Arkansas locations Charles Portis wrote about in his novel True Grit, stop and relax in a historic WPA cabin in Mount Nebo State Park. While Arkansas has its own True Grit Trail (Arkansas 22 from Dardanelle to Fort Smith) and four Dardanelle high school students came up with a route to Oklahoma’s Winding Stair Mountains for the Yell County Historical Society, I follow Rand McNally, Mattie Ross and Paramount Pictures. I will say this to travel writers: It does not happen every day. People do not give it credence that a freelance writer would leave home on an assignment for a Western history magazine to follow the trail of a 14-year-old girl’s quest for justice-since that girl, and her one-eyed deputy marshal friend, never really existed except in Charles Portis’s imagination. Image of Statue Courtesy Fort Smith CVB/Historic Reeves Image Courtesy True West Archives. Reeves is honored with a monument (above) at Ross Pendergraft Park on Garrison Avenue. Born into slavery, Reeves (below) served as a deputy marshal in Fort Smith and elsewhere. Boggs Unless Otherwise Noted True Grit’s Rooster Cogburn is fictional, but Bass Reeves (1838-1910) isn’t. Travel across Arkansas, Oklahoma and Colorado and discover the real and imagined locations of the iconic novel and 1969 film’s locations.Īll Images by Johnny D.
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