True Grit: John Wayne in the San Juans
Near Ridgway, Colorado
Hollywood has been coming to Ridgway for generations, drawn by the same geography that makes this valley extraordinary. The Uncompahgre River cuts through a broad valley below some of the most dramatic mountain scenery in the American West. The San Juan peaks rise to the south in a jagged wall of summits above thirteen and fourteen thousand feet.
The sculpted red cliffs of the Cimarron Range frame the eastern horizon. Directors searching for a landscape that looks like the wild frontier of another century have found what they were looking for here, and the most famous came in the fall of nineteen sixty eight. The film was True Grit, the John Wayne western based on the Charles Portis novel published that same year.
Wayne plays Rooster Cogburn, a rough, whiskey-drinking, one-eyed United States Marshal hired by a stubborn young girl to track down her father's killer through the wild Indian Territory of Arkansas. The production crew arrived in the Ridgway area in the fall of nineteen sixty eight and spent months shooting. The Sherbino Theatre building in downtown Ridgway had a false porch built onto its rear face for use as a period set.
Courtroom scenes were filmed at the Ouray County Courthouse in nearby Ouray. The towering peaks of the San Juans stood in for the hill country of the Arkansas and Oklahoma Territory where Portis had set his story. The film was released in June of nineteen sixty nine and became one of the highest-grossing westerns of its decade.
John Wayne won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as Rooster Cogburn. He had been nominated once before, for Sands of Iwo Jima in nineteen forty nine, but had never won. The Oscar for True Grit was the only Academy Award he ever received, and many critics understood it as a recognition of his entire career in the genre rather than praise for a single performance.
Wayne was known to have been deeply moved by the award. Other productions used the Ridgway landscape before and after True Grit. The epic western How the West Was Won filmed in the valley as well, and the area has appeared in a number of other productions over the decades.
The True Grit Cafe in downtown Ridgway keeps the memory of the Wayne film present in the life of the town. The mountains are the same as when the cameras left. The quality of light that made the valley look like the frontier is still here, still working on anyone who comes down into this valley from the highway above.
