One of the Green Country Oklahoma Adventure Tour?s (GOAT) most beautiful segments runs along a dirt road east of the Illinois River, accessed via Combs Bridge. Photos by Susan Dragoo.

If you’re planning a motorcycle tour in Eastern Oklahoma and you want to find the best roads and the most scenic and historic sites, take a ride with Oklahoma locals Bill and Susan Dragoo in this feature, “Riding the Territory,” from the pages of Rider magazine’s October issue. Scroll down for a route map and a link to the route on REVER.

Red skies silhouette the towering sandstone spires of Monument Valley. A six-horse team gallops across the movie screen in the foreground, pulling a stagecoach trailing a cloud of dust as the occupants desperately try to escape a band of mounted Plains Indians shooting arrows and sending up war whoops. It?s an exciting scene and an image that easily comes to mind when we try to picture life in the 1800s west of the Mississippi. The ?Wild West,? in other words.
While that iconic scene may have occurred at some moment in time, a depiction of Western adventure somewhat closer to reality is the story of True Grit, in which aging U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn is recruited by a teenage girl to track down her father?s killer in the dangerous, outlaw-ridden Indian Territory during the days of ?Hanging Judge? Isaac Parker.

Smooth asphalt winds through lush tree canopies in Eastern Oklahoma, illustrating how Green Country got its...