On the True Grit Trails
True West|April 2022
Travel across Arkansas, Oklahoma and Colorado and discover the real and imagined locations of the iconic novel and 1969 film's locations.
By Johnny D. Boggs
On the True Grit Trails

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.

I will say this to travel writers: It does not happen every day.

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.

And discover how much Portis got right.

In 1968, Simon & Schuster published True Grit, the 34-year-old ex-Arkansas newspaper journalist's second novel. 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 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). Mattie and Yarnell Poindexter, a Black hired hand, leave the Rosses' 480-acre farm in Yell County by train from Dardanelle to Fort Smith. So let's hit the trail.

Arkansas

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