On the True Grit Trails

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

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