Mattie Ross
Sixty-four year old Mattie Ross is narrating the novel as a recollection of events that occurred half a century before. In that time, she’s never married and, indeed, Mattie considers her prickly association drunken US Marshal Rooster Cogburn the single most intimate relationship she has ever had with a man. As a stubborn and driven 14-year-old girl forced to become an adult before her time, she sought out the legendary Cogburn to help track down the man that murdered her father. Together, she and Rooster Cogburn make one of the most unexpected teams to ever deliver frontier justice to an outlaw roaming the Wild West.
Rooster Cogburn
Cogburn is a deputized member of the United States Marshals working in the westernmost area of Arkansas when Mattie comes calling. Cogburn is hardly a Shane-like western knight; he spend time during the Civil War as a guerilla, is fat, one-eyed and spends much of the novel even drunk or on the way to getting drunk. He does possess the one thing that Mattie praises above all else, however: true grit.
LaBoeuf
LaBoeuf is a Texas Ranger who just so happens to be on the trail of the man who killed Mattie’s father, but for an entirely different crime. In fact, he knows the man that Mattie and Rooster are after by an entirely different name. The family of the Texas state senator whom this man also murdered has engaged the services of LaBoeuf to bring him to justice. Mattie and LaBoef come into conflict over the most ridiculous—but still contemporary—reasons: as a resident of the smaller neighboring state of Arkansas, Mattie seems predisposed to find in LaBoef all the negative aspects commonly associated with his Texas: arrogance, flamboyance and pomposity toward anyone not from the Lone Star State.
Tom Chaney/Theron Chelmsford
The murderer that Mattie knows as Tom Chaney is also the killer that LaBoeuf knows as Theron Chelmsford. Following the killing of Mattie’s father, Frank, he takes refuge across the Arkansas River in Indian Territory where he meets up with his gang of similarly low-life desperadoes. The climax of the novel is the inevitable showdown between the desperadoes and the trio in pursuit of justice.
