Dardenelle

For Little Rock Public Radio, this is Dan Boice, with Naming Arkansas.
Several times in the novel True Grit, the heroine proclaims that she is Mattie Ross from near Dardenelle in Yell County, but sadly she never explains just how Dardenelle received its colorful name. The first recorded tale is that the 300-foot-tall bluff on the Arkansas River reminded early settler David Brierly of the Dardenelles in Turkey, a remarkable thing for someone who had probably never been outside of America. Another tale says that Indians used the bluff as a lookout, and that the Indian word Dandonnie means to sleep with one eye open. Alas, the phrase “dort d’un oielle”, to sleep with one eye, is French, not Indian. In fact, when the American explorers arrived, the land was part of a large tract that had been given by the Spanish governors to French explorer Jean Baptist Dardenne, who lost his property to lawless American settlers. If only Dardenne had had Mattie’s cracker jack lawyer J. Noble Daggett, he might have kept the land that still bears his name.
For the University of Arkansas at Monticello, this is Dan Boice.