Recent reads:

True Grit, by Charles Portis. The most notable and captivating characteristic of this 1968 western is the distinctive voice of its narrator, one fourteen-year old Mattie Ross "of near Dardanelle, Arkansas". The novel is told as if she is relating it in her later years, and Portis stays true to her precise, formal, and firmly opinionated voice even when conveying the words of very rough frontier characters who, the reader well knows, probably spoke in much looser and saltier terms. Mattie never glosses over the harrowing events of her tale, though, and the result is a captivating slice of 19th-century adventure, which gains rather than loses authenticity by being filtered through the mind of a believable person of that time and place.

The "true grit" of the title is what Mattie says she is looking for when she goes to Fort Smith, the seat of the nearest territorial court, to seek out a US Marshall or some other champion to help her avenge her father's death at the hands of an outlaw. The man she hires to track him into the untamed Indian Territory to the west is "Rooster" Cogburn, an aging, overweight, profane, whiskey-snorting, one-eyed veteran of Civil War guerrilla fighting who is, by modern standards, barely one step above the outlaws he hunts. But, Mattie concludes, he does have "true grit". Subsequent events prove that she, too, possesses this quality, as she insists on accompanying Cogburn and a Texas Ranger on their bounty hunt for the miscreant and the gang with which they think he may be associated.

The book was, of course, made into a movie in 1969, with John Wayne playing the role of Rooster Cogburn, a role for which he was perfectly suited in his later years. I haven't seen the movie (yet), but I note that New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby spoke slightingly of a scene in which Cogburn, facing multiple armed opponents, responds by charging them on horseback, blasting away with a revolver in each hand. This is pure fantasy, says the reviewer. And yet historians of the Civil War guerrilla fighting, such as Thomas Goodrich (Black Flag, et al) report that this was in fact a tactic frequently used by the Confederate partisans of that bloody conflict. Partisans, armed with a revolver in each hand (and sometimes several more stashed about their person), would seek situations from which they could charge on horseback, from relatively short range, at the more conventionally armed soldiers, taking advantage of their greater mobility and faster rate of fire to startle, disorient, and decimate larger and nominally more powerful forces. A Federal soldier armed with a relatively slow, clumsy long gun and only one pistol had little chance, at short range, against a mounted partisan in full charge, firing at will from dual revolvers and, when his ammunition was exhausted, discarding them to draw out a second, and then a third pair of such revolvers. It's already been established, in the novel, that Cogburn was among these guerrillas. And in one of his rare forthcoming moods, he's spoken thus to his teenage employer:

"I had to fly for my life [from New Mexico]. Three fights in one day. Bo was a strong colt then and there was not a horse in that territory could run him in the ground. But I did not appreciate being chased and shot at like a thief. When the posse had thinned down to about seven men I turned Bo around and taken the reins in my teeth and rode right at them boys firing them two navy sixes I carry on my saddle. I guess they was all married men who loved their families as they scattered and run for home."

"That is hard to believe."

"What is?"

"One men riding at seven men like that."

"It is true enough. We done it in the war. I seen a dozen bold riders stampede a full troop of regular cavalry. You go for a man hard enough and fast enough and he don't have time to think about how many is with him, he thinks about himself and how he may get clear out of the wrath that is about to set down on him." (pp. 143-144, book club ed.)

Is it any wonder if, faced with a tight spot, an aging guerrilla would revert to tactics that had worked in the past? Perhaps the reviewer from Noooo Yooorrk Ciiiity should have familiarized himself with his subject before labelling it a "fantasy".