Marion Morrison
and
Literary Friend

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It's been quite a while since the two movies came out, but one point of debate - albeit perhaps less intense now than in the past - is just which cinematic version of True Grit was better. Was it the last one released in 2010 starring Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, and Matt Damon? Or the first one in 1969 with John Wayne, Kim Darby, and Glen Campbell?

Well, as they say, in matters de movieandibus, just as de gustibus, non est disputandum.

But whichever movie you prefer, notice how only a few people ever ask the question:

Which was better...

The

MOVIES

or the

BOOK?

Yes. The Book. In our society of ultra-electronic visual entertainment it can be easily forgotten that True Grit was originally a novel written by journalist Charles Portis. It was first published in 1968, became a best seller (after serialization in The Saturday Evening Post), and John Wayne immediately acquired the movie rights. The movie with John, Kim, and Glen was released the next year.

Some people would say, well, the first film must be the best one. After all, "Duke" Wayne won the Oscar for Best Actor. And don't forget in winning the award he bested other top-notch contenders like Richard Burton in Anne of the Thousand Days, Dustin Hoffman and John Voight in Midnight Cowboy, and Peter O'Toole in Good-bye, Mr. Chips.

Of course, here the curmudgeons will step in. Huh! they say. The award was nothing more than a consolation prize! Despite his 40 year movie career and appearing in Oscar winners like Stagecoach and The Quiet Man, John Wayne had never won an Oscar himself.

Glen Campbell, though, had an alternative explanation for the Academy's decision when he spoke with sportscaster Curt Gowdy. "I was so bad in True Grit that I made John Wayne look good, and he won the Oscar."

Glen's self-deprecatory comment was understandable. Even his biggest fans will admit he doesn't really deliver his lines with naturalistic ease, and one drama student at a major midwestern university even remarked about "Glen Campbell reading from his idiot cards."

However, that's a bit of a harsh judgment. The movie's dialog is actually following the style of the book which was supposed to be the first person account written by an elderly Mattie Ross. Although it's not true - as suggested in the MAD Magazine satire - that Mattie uses no contractions, her characters do speak in a bit of a stilted style which carries over into the dialog of the actors. That includes Robert Duvall, who was certainly one of the best actors in the 20th and 21st century, a master of dialects and accents, and who played the part of the outlaw "Lucky" Ned Pepper. All in all, with what he was handed, Glen doesn't do that bad of a job.

Of course, any decision as to which movie is better must needs have call into question the criteria for the selection. Certainly both movies follow the plot of the book fairly well, although perhaps the first movie has fewer scriptwriter's inventions.

For instance, in the second movie Mattie tries to contact Rooster by knocking on an outhouse door that's out back of a saloon while Rooster was - ah - "meditating". No proper Victorian girl, no matter how forthright, would do that. She wouldn't even enter a saloon.

In both the book and the first movie, Mattie meets the Texas ranger, known only by his last name, LaBoeuf (pronounced la-BEEF) in the dining room of the Monarch boarding house that was managed by the garrulous Mrs. Floyd. Although in the second movie Mattie sees LaBoeuf in the parlor, she doesn't actually meet him until he sits down in her bedroom while she's still asleep and waits for her to wake up. Again not something that would happen in the Old West amongst "respectable" people.

LaBoeuf, by the way, is now almost always spelled as the grammatically correct LeBoeuf. LeBoeuf (with the "e") is ranked 8,824 in the United States at the Millennium Census, while LaBoeuf (with the "a") doesn't even register. However, a search of old newspapers and documents does show people sporting the "a" version. And there are some cemetery markers that memorialize various LaBoeufs and the name is attested in birth and death certificates. So yes, Virginia, there are LaBoeufs in the world.

In the novel and the first movie, LaBoeuf travels with Mattie and Rooster throughout the manhunt for Tom Chaney (played by the prolific character actor Jeff Corey¹). But in the second movie LaBoeuf heads out on his own. So when Rooster decides to (literally) smoke out two stock thieves, Moon Garrett and Emmett Quincy, at a "squatter's" cabin, LaBoeuf is out and about somewhere. So it's Mattie (Hailee) who blocks the chimney with Rooster's jacket. In the book LaBoeuf damps the chimney while Mattie holds the horses in a brake of cedar trees.

The first movie kept closer to the book's description of the shootout at the cabin. Rooster, Mattie, and LaBoeuf had planned to take shelter there but found it was already occupied by Moon and Quincy. But Quincy stabs Moon after he "blows" the story that Ned Pepper's gang, which Tom Chaney has joined, are supposed to show up that night after robbing the train on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas rail line (the MK&T or "Katy" Flyer) at Wagoner's switch. After Moon dies (and Quincy is killed by Rooster), Mattie and Rooster set up on one hillside and LaBoeuf takes cover on the other and they wait for Ned and the others to show up. But then LaBoeuf disrupts the plans by firing prematurely.

But in the second movie, Rooster and Mattie set up the ambush themselves since LaBoeuf was no longer traveling with them. Then just before the bandits arrive, LaBoeuf shows up. Ned and the other outlaws capture the Texan, lasso him with a rope, drag him behind a horse, and in the gunfight that follows, LaBoeuf ends up getting shot in the shoulder and biting his tongue so badly that he talks funny for a while.

Why such a departure from the plot is anyone's guess. Perhaps having LaBoeuf say he was "theverely" injured was seen as needed comic relief. And of course, the "it's-only-my-shoulder" wounds in Hollywood gunfights were seemingly no more a bother than a skinned elbow. The reality was that in a gunfight shoulder wounds were extremely serious and one medical doctor said that LaBoeuf's wound as depicted in the movie would likely have been fatal in minutes.

Because of the movies when people think of Rooster Cogburn, they conjure up an image of an old cowboy with an eyepatch. And in the book, Rooster was indeed an "old one-eyed jasper". True, he was actually forty-two years old, which may seem old for a fourteen year old girl, but it is quite a bit younger than the late fifties and early sixties of Jeff Bridges and John Wayne.

One critic pointed out that the screenplay of the second movie had Jeff wear the patch on his right eye. That was, we read, to better fit with the description of the book rather than having the patch on the left as John wore it.

A strange comment. For one thing, in the book Rooster didn't even have an eyepatch. Instead, his eye was fused shut where - as Mattie described - "a little crescent of white showed at the bottom." Of course, the patch was a concession to the visual requirements of cinema where it's much easier to show someone has only one eye if the actor wears a patch.

But as to which eye was bad, the book is clear. Mattie stated unambiguously "his bad left eye was not completely shut." That's his bad left eye.

Nor in the novel was Rooster clean shaven (like John), nor did he wear a beard (as did Jeff). Instead Rooster sported a formidable mustache in a style that was common for men in the Old West.

In the movies there's comment on Rooster's girth. When he calls on Ned Pepper to surrender, both scripts use Ned's taunting reply, "I call that bold talk for a one-eye fat man" which along with Rooster's response was verbatim from the book. Mad Magazine even named its satire, True Fat. But such remarks may leave the movie viewers scratching their heads since neither John or Jeff, although far from harboring slender builds, are by no means corpulent men.

But in the novel Rooster hauls around considerable poundage. Mattie describes Rooster as being built along the lines of Grover Cleveland and was so heavy that in the courtroom "the floorboards squeaked under his weight."

Roosters rotundity is a recurring topic in the book, and Rooster himself sometimes comments on it. At Bagby's store (a fictional location), he, Mattie, and LaBoeuf were being ferried cross the Arkansas River by two teenage boys. Earlier Rooster had kicked the boys into the mud because they were laughing at the sufferings of a mule who had been tethered to a post where the rope had contracted in the sun and had pulled tight. Rooster freed the mule and when they were on the ferry one of the boys said that the mule's owner would want to know who cut the animal loose.

Rooster said, "Tell him it was Mr. James, a bank examiner from Clay County, Missouri." The boy understood the answer - as Rooster intended - to mean that his passenger was Jesse James who was still at large.

The boy didn't believe it, of course. "The James boys are said to be slight men," he said.

"One of them has grown fat", Rooster replied. This scene is included in the second movie albeit with some modifications.

Rooster's heft is one of the few places that the novel's background departs from historical accuracy. Photographs of the Fort Smith deputies show even the larger ones like Heck Thomas may have become stocky in their middle age, but they were inevitably medium sized men, trim and fit. Heavyset men were just too hard on the horses, and even the stoutest steed couldn't bear a Grover Cleveland lookalike for fifty miles particularly with a good part of it being made at a gallop in the way Bo carried Rooster on the last leg of their hunt for Ned Pepper and his gang.

So it would be highly unlikely that a man "built along the lines of Grover Cleveland" could have been an effective deputy marshal for Judge Parker. True, from 1871 to 1873, Grover served as sheriff of Erie County, New York, but his duties were largely - as were those of most sheriffs - in an administrative capacity and he didn't get involved in strong arm stuff.²

Of course, most movies based on books, whether historical or fiction, usually contain scriptwriter's inventions. In the book Mattie does not bang on the outhouse door as in the second movie, she and Rooster do not find a man hanging from a tree, and they don't come across a "bear man". Nor when Mattie arrived at Fort Smith to claim her father's body does she have to sleep in the room at the undertaker's parlor with the bodies. She slept the first night at the boarding house.

But the first movie also has the occasional scriptwriter's addition. In the final scene Rooster (John) is with Mattie (Kim) at her home near Dardanelle, Arkansas. At their last encounter with the bandits, Mattie fell into a pit where she broke her arm and was bitten on her hand by a rattlesnake. She was rescued by Rooster and LaBoeuf and at the end we see Mattie with her arm in a sling. So we're allowed to conclude she eventually made a full recovery from both the fracture and the snakebite.

Mattie and Rooster part with some gentle teasings. Mattie makes a final remark about Rooster's heftiness, and we presume that Rooster and Mattie went their ways to live happy and peaceful lives. As nice as it would have been for the story to end up that way, this scene wasn't in the novel.

It's the ending of the second movie that's taken pretty much from the book. It's 1903 and Mattie, now forty years old, learns from her younger brother, Little Frank, that Rooster is still alive and doing a trick shooting act in Cole Younger and Frank James's Wild West Show. And yes, the historical Cole Younger and Frank James did organize a Wild West show although it only toured for a year.

We also see that Mattie lost her left arm from the snake bite as in the book because, as we hear in the voiceover, her arm became gangrenous on their trip back to Fort Smith. In the book, though, Mattie was treated in Fort Smith and only later did gangrene set in. The cause, by the way, could have been less from the snakebite than from Rooster's "emergency" treatment - cutting the area of the bite to make it bleed and then chewing some tobacco and packing it on the wound.

When Mattie arrived in Memphis, she saw the train of the Wild West show was parked on the siding. There she learned from Cole Younger that Rooster had died a few days before. Mattie then had Rooster's body exhumed and reburied in her family plot. Her remark to Frank James is direct from the novel.

As to where the first movie most departed from the novel, it's where LaBoeuf (Glen Campbell) dies from being hit on the head by Tom Chaney. In the novel and the second film, although LaBoeuf had a concussion, he recovers and takes Chaney's body back to Texas to claim the reward.

To be fair we have to point out that novelists, even when writing historical fiction, sometimes make, well, adjustments to the record. In the book when Mattie and Yarnell first arrive in Fort Smith, they attend a public hanging of three men, two whites and one Native American (then called "Indians"). The prisoners are each given time to say a few words and unlike in the second movie, the Native prisoner was allowed to finish his statement. Then the hangman, George Maledon, goes to the lever and springs the trap.

From information provided in the book, we can determine that Mattie was born in 1863 which was after her father, Frank Ross, fought at the Battle of Elkhorn Tavern. And although she wrote that LaBoeuf was about thirty years old, the Texas Ranger had actually turned 28 about a month before Mattie met him. We also deduce that Mattie was writing the book in 1928 since it was the year after Al Smith had been selected as the Democratic nominee for President but the actual election had not yet been held. So Mattie was sixty-four or sixty-five.

Although the basis for these conclusions might be the subject of a new essay, for now the reasoning will be, as the mathematics textbooks say, left as an exercise for the reader. The conclusions, though, are based on pinpointing Mattie's trip to Fort Smith down to December, 1877.

Despite the image of a never ending procession of condemned men marching to the gallows at the command of "Hanging Judge" Isaac Parker, executions were scarcely a common occurrence - perhaps occurring on one or two days a year and there were some years with no executions at all.

And one of those years sans exécution was 1877.³

But perhaps the major disconnect with both movies and the book isn't a specific event. Instead, it's the depiction of the character of Reuben J. Cogburn compared to the image that Mattie has of him.

Rooster Cogburn is outwardly rough, cantankerous, and a hard character, yes. But the Rooster of John Wayne's portrayal, and in someways that of Jeff's, is nevertheless a man of integrity who works to rid society of the criminals who prey on innocent people. Rough on the outside, soft on the inside. In the book, this is basically Mattie's image of the man she sees as "a resolute officer of Parker's court" and a man with, yes, true grit.

However, in the novel the reader sees an individual whose personality and philosophy of life is, shall we say, more complex.

When Rooster tells his story to Mattie while waiting for the bandits to show up, we learn he rode with William Clarke Quantrill during the Civil War. Quantrill was the Confederate guerrilla raider who with his men attacked Lawrence, Kansas, in August, 1863, and killed all the men and teenage boys in town - about 150 victims in all. Quantrill and "Bloody Bill" Anderson were among the most violent of the Confederate partisans. In addition to Rooster and his friend Columbus Potter, among the guerrillas were Frank James (who Rooster remembered well) and the teenage Jesse (who Rooster didn't remember at all).

After Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Rooster and Potter rode into Independence, Missouri, and gave themselves up. Normally all that the Confederate veterans had to do was sign a loyalty oath and they would be allowed to go home. But having fought in Kansas and Missouri, they were given a one day parole and told to report back the next morning. A Union major from Kansas was going to look over the men who surrendered to see if there were any "bushwackers", that is, illegal combatants like those who fought with Quantrill and "Bloody Bill" Anderson.

Not wanting to meet the Kansas major, that night Rooster and Potter stole two horses and a pistol, and on the way out of Independence they robbed a Union Army paymaster of over $4000 in gold. They divided the money and Potter headed to Arkansas where he soon became a deputy federal marshal for the United States District Court for the Western District of Arkansas which had jurisdiction over the Indian Territory, ergo, modern Oklahoma except for the panhandle. Rooster went to Illinois, married a grass widow (a divorced woman), and opened a saloon.

Neither Rooster's business nor the marriage lasted. Rooster sold the saloon, became a buffalo hunter and hunted wolves for bounty in Texas, freighted supplies out of Denver, robbed a bank in Las Vegas, New Mexico, evaded the posse, lost his money betting on horse races, hooked up with a trail drive going from Texas to Kansas, and near the North Canadian River in Oklahoma took a shot at one of the herd's owners who had refused to help him free a bogged down cow from the river bank.

The owner was wounded and ordered the other men to disarm Rooster and turn him over to the authorities at Fort Reno about 30 miles west of modern Oklahoma City. But at the fort Rooster found his friend Potter, who was now a federal deputy marshal, was picking up some prisoners to take back to Fort Smith. Potter used a bit of subterfuge and instead of taking Rooster back for trial got him a job as a deputy.

Rooster's methods as an officer were, well, irregular. He was fast on the trigger and in his nearly four years as a deputy had killed twenty-three men, always claiming he was defending himself. His usual story was that he would come upon the bad guy and identify himself as a marshal. Then the bad guy would pick up an improvised weapon of some sort - once it was a king bolt⁴ from a wagon tongue - and Rooster would try to "talk some sense" into the man to convince him to surrender. But inevitably the man would try to attack Rooster who would then be forced to shoot him - as we said, in self defense, of course.

Of course.

However, on the hunt for Tom Chaney we don't see a cautious and restrained law officer. Instead we see a man willing to put the end well above the means and who has no hesitation in shooting an unsuspecting man in the back to show that Rooster's "intentions is serious". He would also be willing to appropriate personal belongings - called "traps" - of anyone he kills to supplement his deputy's pay.

Rooster's character as described was not stretching verisimilitude. In the Old West there were men who would pin a badge on one year and be robbing banks the next. We can think of the Dalton brothers, Bob and Grat, who actually served as deputy marshals for Judge Parker (as did their non-outlaw brother Frank). But in 1892 they and brother Emmett joined forces with Bill Doolin, Dick Broadwell, and Bill Powers and tried - and failed - to rob two banks at the same time in Coffeyville, Kansas. John Selman was a leader of a band of rustlers and killers in Lincoln County, New Mexico, in 1878, and yet later served as constable in El Paso, Texas. Even the famous Wyatt Earp, after serving as a town marshal in Dodge City, Deadwood, and Tombstone, ended up having to flee Arizona to avoid a murder indictment. In his later years he never returned to the territory that made him famous.

Then there's Henry Newton Brown, a lesser known figure of the Old West, but as colorful as any. Born in Missouri, Henry - who sometimes spelled his name "Hendry" - went west as a young man, worked as a cowboy, and in the late 1870's found himself in Lincoln County, New Mexico. There he joined the gang known as the Regulators whose most famous member was Billy the Kid.

When the Regulators split up, Henry left New Mexico, and became a law officer in Tascosa, Texas. He then went to Oklahoma (Indian Territory) and on to Caldwell, Kansas, where he became the town marshal. He quickly became well respected, and one of the town's premiere citizens.

Then in 1884 four men entered the bank at Medicine Lodge, Kansas, about 60 miles from Caldwell. The robbery was botched and the men got away with no money. However, the bank president was killed, and the robbers were pursued by a posse and finally cornered in a box canyon. When they surrendered it turns out one of the bandits was, yes, Henry Newton Brown.

The men were imprisoned in the city jail and because an innocent citizen had been killed they were worried about a lynch mob. Their worries were well founded and a group of men broke into the jail on April 30, 1884, and that was pretty much that for Marshal Henry Brown.

Oh, yes. We did mention Billy the Kid, bandit, rustler, and cold-blooded murderer, didn't we? Surely, he can't be one of those bad-guy-one-year and a good-guy-the-next fellows, can he?

Well, according to official records in the federal archives filed by the US Marshal of Arizona, when Billy the Kid killed two of his most famous victims, Frank Baker and Bill Morton, William H. Bonney was a duly deputized federal marshal who was acting in the proper course of his duties.

Billy and Friends
Duly Appointed Deputies

The attention to historical detail in the novel will be appreciated by Old West buffs. In particular, the lie of the land and the places were well researched. Some people have even used the book to make "True Grit Tours", in both Oklahoma and Arkansas.

In their travels, Mattie, Rooster, and LaBoeuf visit J. J. McAlester's store (a scene skipped in the second movie), and Mattie mentioned it became the "modern little city" of McAlester, Oklahoma. Even as early as 1874, maps marked the location as a bonafide town, although by the looks of the maps (and Mattie's description), it was a small town. A very small town.

Oh, yes. A common spelling on the old maps is "McAllister" and on one map it's even labeled as "McAallister", not only with a double "l" but a double "a". Variant (and phonetic) spellings in contemporary records of the Old West are the norm rather than the exception.

Naturally, there's a bit of wiggle room in the description of the hunt for Tom Chaney, Ned Pepper, and the rest. Nevertheless when fortified with good modern and vintage maps and the details in the book, the knowledgeable reader can lay out a reasonable itinerary of the trip and relate it to place names past and present.

The first night's campsite after Mattie, Rooster, and LaBoeuf left Fort Smith was about 45 miles northeast of McAlester and two or three miles east of the modern Choctaw Casino just outside Stigler, Oklahoma. This is fifteen miles southwest of the crossing at Bagby's store which was on the original bank of the Arkansas River (now under the Robert S. Kerr Reservoir).

Bagby's store was (to quote Rooster) "a good 60 miles" from McAlester's. They planned to reach McAlester's the next day but due to a snowfall, they had to turn west after passing through the edge of the San Bois Mountains to reach the squatter's cabin.⁵ From there the next morning and after an hour's ride west to the Texas Road - an old cattle drive trail and now essentially the route of US 69 - they went south and reached McAlester's store in mid-morning.

They left McAlester's and traveled about 50 miles east and a little south to reach the Winding Stair Mountains. There they accidentally camped just across a stream from the bandit's hideout which was modeled after Robber's Cave, traditionally the refuge of Myra Maybelle Shirley (also known as Belle Starr) and her gang, although the cave is really in a state park further north in the San Bois range. After the robbers are bested, Tom Chaney is killed, and Mattie bitten by the rattlesnake, Rooster and Mattie return to Fort Smith, presumably in as near a straight line as possible since they reach the Poteau River and don't return by Bagby's store as they did in the second movie.

True Grit Itinerary
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Although much of the land is unchanged from the 1870's, a major alteration is the presence of reservoirs and artificial lakes. For instance, the place where the squatter's cabin was located would be a bit south and east of the Juniper Point Recreational Area on Lake Eufala which was formed after the damming of the Canadian River.

Lake Eufala is a big lake and stretches over 30 miles in a north-south direction and about 15 in the east-west line. A likely location of the cabin would actually be beneath the surface of the modern lake.

But if you can't reach the cabin's site you can at least get pretty close - and in doing so you can visit the nearby and scenic hamlet of Bugtussle, Oklahoma!

References and Further Reading

True Grit, Charles Portis, Simon and Schuster, 1968.

"True Grit Book vs Movie", Laura, Why the Book Wins.

Law West of Fort Smith, Glen Shirley, Henry Holt and Company, 1957.

Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters, Bill O'Neal, University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.

"A Murderer's Career", The Stark County Democrat, September 4, 1879, Page 1.

"Execution of Murderers", The [Jefferson City, Missouri] State Journal, December 27, 1878, p. 5., Chronicling America, Library of Congress.

"Men Executed at Fort Smith: 1873 to 1896", Fort Smith National Historical Site, National Park Service.

"Fort Smith Gallows", Fort Smith National Historical Site, National Park Service.

"Texas Road", Bobby Weaver, The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.

"Map Showing the Land Grants of the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern and Little Rock & Fort Smith Railways in Arkansas", Portal of Texas History, University of North Texas.

"True Grit Trail Drive from Dardanelle to Fort Smith Set for Saturday, October 2nd, Michelle Widner, River Valley Now, September 29, 2021

"On the Trail of 'True Grit': A Tale Comes to Life", Jay Jennings, The New York Times, July 16, 2014.

"Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad", Encyclopedia of Arkansas.

"Buck Gang Executed", The Indianapolis Journal, July 2, 1896, p. 4, Chronicling America, Library of Congress.

Red, Black, and Deadly, Arthur Burton, Eakin Press, 1991.

"Billy the Kid and the U.S. Marshals Service", David S. Turk, History Net.

"Not-So-True True Grit", True West, Jim Kornberg, November/December 2011.

"Jesse James: The Birth of a Killer", T.J. Stiles, True West, April 2020

"Find Your Surname", American Last Names.

"LaBoeuf", Find-a-Grave.

"True Grit", Internet Movie Data Base.

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