Volume 17 , Issue 38

Cattle Annie & Little Britches

Annie Emmaline McDoulet, alias Cattle Annie, who went around with another lady named Little Britches, otherwise Jennie Stevenson Midkiff. They were spies for or part of the Doolin Gang. Annie was born in Kansas on 29 November 1882, as Emma McDoulet, the daughter Judge J. C. and Rebecca McDoulet. Judge McDoulet studied law in Kentucky and served as a justice of the peace in Red Rock, Indian Territory, as well as an attorney for Indians living nearby.

In her youth Emma McDoulet worked in restaurants and as a domestic until she turned to crime. Cattle Annie and Little Britches roamed the territory, living on the Otoe Reservation when they were arrested for selling liquor to Indians.

It was September 1895 McDoulet was remanded to a reformatory at Framingham, Massachusetts. Prison records describe her as single, age sixteen (actually 13), five feet, three and one-half inches tall, and weighing 122 pounds.

Cattle Annie and Jennie Midkiff were renegade white horse and cattle thieves in the Osage Nation before it was incorporated into the state of Oklahoma.

Cattle Annie led her own gang of men and Little Britches was her lieutenant. Cattle Annie wore a cowboy hat and dressed and carried a rifle. Little Britches wore a cowboy hat and men's trousers, vest and jacket, and a cartridge belt and a double holster with two six guns. Both of these ladies were tough, they carried guns like other women carried parasols, and strong men quailed when they walked into a saloon.

Newspapers credited the arrests of these two to Sheriff Frank Lake and deputy U.S. Marshals Steve Burke and Frank Canton. Records did not indicate that either girl had been involved with the Doolin gang or any other gang. Both women were captured by federal authorities in 1814, and sent to prison. After they were released, Annie was supposed to have led a respectable life but Little Britches simply dropped out of sight. All she did was put on a skirt and nobody knew her anymore.

Reformatory records did indicate that Annie did not wish to return home, for fear that she would relapse into crime. After her release on 18 April 1898, Annie obtained a job, probably as a domestic, with a Mrs. Mary Daniels, in Sherborn, Massachusetts. However, McDoulet did return to Oklahoma. She married Earl Frost in Perry, Oklahoma Territory, on March 13, 1901, and they had two children. In October 1909 in Noble County the couple divorced, because Emma had joined a Wildwest show. Later she married Whitmore R. Roach, a general painting contractor, and they lived in Oklahoma City.

We find that Cattle Annie lived out her life as a quiet, respectable bookkeeper, active member of the American Legion Auxiliary and the Olivet Baptist Church. Emma McDoulet died on November 7, 1978, and buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Oklahoma City.

Little Britches

Little Britches was born Jennie Stevenson in 1879, in Barton County, in southwestern Missouri, to a farm couple, Daniel and Lucy Stevenson. She had one known sister, Victoria Estella Stevenson. Jennie dropped the "son" from her maiden name "Stevenson." For a time Jennie was known as Jennie Stevenson Stephens after she married her second husband.

The Stevenson family lived during part of the 1880s in Seneca in Newton County, also in southwestern Missouri on the eastern border of Oklahoma, then Indian territory. They moved into the Creek Nation at Sinnett in Pawnee County in the northern Indian Territory. Little Britches followed stories of the Bill Doolin gang written by such dime novelists as Ned Buntline, like her friend Cattle Annie.

Little Britches joined the Doolin 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 married a deaf-mute horse dealer, Benjamin Midriff, in March 1895. They established housekeeping in a hotel in Perry in Noble County in northern Oklahoma. Midriff found Jennie unfaithful, and he returned the teenager to her father after the two had been together for only six weeks. Within a day of returning home, Jennie began riding along the Arkansas River in search of outlaw adventure.

It was soon afterwards that Jennie married Robert Stephens, but the union lasted only six months. At a community dance Jennie and Annie met the Doolin gang, later called the "Wild Bunch." These outlaws maintained a hideaway in the Creek Nation cave, located on the Cimarron River in Payne County near Ingalls east of Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Little Britches and Cattle Annie were excellent horsewomen and markswomen who dressed in men's clothing. The two women evaded law enforcement and became known for their daring pursuits throughout the region. They sold whiskey to the Osage and Pawnee tribes and engaged in horse theft. They also alerted other outlaws about the location of law enforcement officers.

In mid-August, 1895, Little Britches was captured, but soon escaped from a restaurant in Pawnee, Oklahoma Territory, while she was in the custody of Sheriff Frank Lake. Journalist accounts maintain that she left through the back door of the establishment despite the presence of a guard. She tore off her dress, grabbed the horse of a deputy marshal, and galloped away into the night.

Little Britches was incarcerated for two months in the Guthrie jail (under the name Jennie Midkiff, from her first husband of six weeks) as a material witness in a murder trial. She had witnessed a shooting while working as a domestic. Little Britches' two-year prison sentence for horse theft and selling whisky to the Indians began in 1895. She, too, was sentenced to the reformatory in Framingham. She was released in October 1896, under terms of good behavior, and returned to her parents. Her final years are unknown, though some stories circulated that she married for a third time, reared a family, and led an exemplary life thereafter in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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