Little Britches

Jennie Stevenson (born 1879), known as Little Britches, was an outlaw in the American Old West associated with Cattle Annie. Their exploits are fictionalized in the 1981 film Cattle Annie and Little Britches, directed by Lamont Johnson and starring Diane Lane as Little Britches.

Background Born Jennie Stevens in Barton County in southwestern Missouri, to a farm couple, Daniel and Lucy Stevenson,

Enchantment with crime Little Britches joined the Doolin-Dalton gang but lost her horse and returned home to the stern rebuke of her father. She was determined nevertheless to pursue a life of crime, and she married a deaf-mute horse dealer, Benjamin Midkiff, in March 1895. They established housekeeping in a hotel in Perry in Noble County in northern Oklahoma. Midkiff found her unfaithful, however, and he returned the teenager to her father after the two had been together for only six weeks. Within a day of returning home, she began riding along the Arkansas River in search of outlaw adventure.

Alternate reports The Oklahoma Journal of History and Culture contends that Tilghman likely had nothing to do with the apprehension of Little Britches. Newspapers credited both captures to Lake, Burke, and Frank Canton, another deputy marshal. The publication further contends that neither girl had been involved with the Doolins or any other outlaw gang.

Imprisonment The two young women were tried for horse theft and the sale of alcohol to the Indians before U.S. District Judge Andrew Gregg Curtin Bierer Sr. (1862–1951) at his court in Guthrie in Logan County, capital of the Oklahoma Territory.

In print Novelist Robert Ward, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, wrote Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1977), his personal interpretation of the romantic legends of the Doolin-Dalton gang.

In television Actress Gloria Winters (of the Sky King aviation adventure television series) portrayed Little Britches in a 1954 episode of the syndicated Stories of the Century, a western anthology series starring and narrated by Jim Davis. In this story, Little Britches became smitten with an outlaw named Dave Ridley, played by James Best, rather than Bill Doolin. Little Britches is shown at the conclusion of the episode leaving the Framingham reformatory and anonymously working in a soup kitchen in a slum section of New York City. In the 1962 episode "Girl with a Gun", on the anthology series, Death Valley Days, Anne Helm filled the title role of Jennie Metcalf, with Ken Mayer as Marshal Hobe Martin.

Other uses of Little Britches "Little Britches" is used across the United States as the proper name of numerous business, including day-care centers, pediatric clinics, clothing stores, bakeries, boutiques, and even an employment agency for nannies. Nor should Little Britches the outlaw be confused with:

The childhood autobiography by Ralph Moody entitled, Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers (1991), the story of a boy growing up on a ranch near Littleton, Colorado. The National Little Britches Rodeo Association, which bills itself as the "oldest, continuing junior rodeo association in the nation," directed toward the interests of western-minded youth. The National Little Britches Rodeo Finals are held annually in late July at the Colorado State Fair in Pueblo.