“It was wonderful indeed how I could have heart-to-heart talks with my dogs and they always seemed to understand. Each question I asked was answered in their own doggish way.

Although they couldn’t talk in my terms, they had a language of their own that was easy to understand. Sometimes I would see the answer in their eyes, and again it would be in the friendly wagging of their tails…. In some way, they would always answer.”

Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows, 1961

Woodrow Wilson Rawls (1913-1984) is one of the most well-known Oklahoma authors, thanks mostly to Where the Red Fern Grows. If you haven’t already been assigned to read it in school, you probably will be! Woody, as he was called, was a citizen of Cherokee Nation, and grew up in the Ozarks in eastern Oklahoma, just like Billy Colman, the main character of Where the Red Fern Grows. Also like Billy, Rawls’s family left Oklahoma during the Great Depression, and he eventually travelled all over the country and even to Canada and South America for work. Still, he revisited his Oklahoma childhood in stories he was always jotting down, and eventually his wife, Sophie, encouraged him to try to publish one. First published serially in a magazine as “The Hounds of Youth,” this story later became the book, Where the Red Fern Grows, in 1961. In 1974 the book was made into a movie, which involved recreating the house Rawls grew up in, and he was invited back to visit it. “I stayed for ten days,” he said, “and relived my youth. It was wonderful.”

Where the Red Fern Grows is above all a story of a boy’s love for his two hunting dogs. Rawls also had a hunting dog as a boy: a bluetick coonhound. In the novel, though, Billy’s dogs are redbone coonhounds—an American-bred hunting dog you can find out more about.

The “red fern” of the title is presented in the story as a mythical and sacred plant from an “old Indian legend.” You’ll have to read to the end of the book to really appreciate it, but you can learn more here about the species of fern it is believed to be.

Also, Tahlequah, the capital of Cherokee Nation, holds a Red Fern Festival every year to celebrate Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows, and the history of the region. Check it out in April!