Cattle Annie and Little Britches: The Forgotten Outlaw Girls Who Became Western Myth

America loves mythology. We especially love creating our own—mythic heroes carved from nostalgia, grit, and the wide-open promise of the frontier. For decades, Hollywood’s simplest path to building larger-than-life heroes was to retell the legends of the Old West. Outlaws became icons; criminals became folk heroes; ordinary lives were inflated into something symbolic, something aspirational, something distinctly American.

But for all the obsession with rugged individualism, Western mythology rarely made space for women. Annie Oakley made it through, sure, but her legend became so polished it lost its edge by the 20th retelling. The system simply wasn’t built to immortalize women who didn’t fit the mold. That’s part of what made Robert Ward’s 1978 novel Cattle Annie and Little Britches so unusual: it reached into the margins of Western history and pulled out two teenage girls—the kind who rarely got mythologized at all.

The Verifiable Facts Behind the Legend

Anna Emmaline McDoulet, better known as Cattle Annie, was born in Kansas in 1882 and died in Oklahoma City in 1978. She truly was a teenager when she ran afoul of the law and was sent to a reform school in Framingham, Massachusetts. Jennie Stevenson—later Jennie Midkiff—known as Little Britches, followed a similar path. Archival records and the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History confirm their arrests, their brief sentences, and the long, quiet lives they lived afterward.

Both girls were loosely associated with the remnants of the Doolin–Dalton gang, better known as the Wild Bunch, serving as scouts, lookouts, and occasional horse thieves. They weren’t gunslingers so much as sharp-eyed kids hovering at the fringe of danger, orbiting notorious outlaws whose names were already making their way into dime novels and court transcripts. Their history is small but real—a footnote of youth swallowed by the machinery of crime, media, and law enforcement.

Where the Movie Diverges—and Why It Matters

The 1981 movie Cattle Annie and Little Britches reimagines this story with Diane Lane and Amanda Plummer playing older, more independent teens. In reality, the girls were younger, more vulnerable, and far more peripheral to Bill Doolin and his crew than the film suggests. They weren’t surrogate daughters to Doolin. They weren’t emotional lodestars for a gang of outlaws. They were kids—observant, hungry for belonging, and swept up in circumstances they barely understood.

Hollywood aged them up, granted them agency, and placed them at the center of the Doolin-Dalton legend. In doing so, the film swaps the melancholy truth for nostalgic fantasy. Instead of brief criminal careers that ended in reform school and anonymity, the movie imagines a bittersweet outlaw coming-of-age story steeped in sentiment and gentle rebellion. It’s mythmaking, not reportage, and it tells you immediately what story the filmmakers wanted to tell.

The Real Story’s Quiet Power

There is something fragile and resonant in the true story of Cattle Annie and Little Britches: two teenage girls mimicking the outlaw glamour they read in dime novels, only to be caught, processed, and returned to the world as anonymous adults. Their lives collapse multiple American fascinations—myth, youth, rebellion, and reinvention—into a brief, flickering chapter.

It’s a story about how legend is built, who gets remembered, and how performance becomes identity. The movie brushes against these themes but stops short of embracing the darker, lonelier truths behind them.

Why the Movie Was Forgotten

Released during a downturn in Western popularity, Cattle Annie and Little Britches was nearly impossible to market. Its tone wasn’t action-driven enough for adventure fans, nor wholesome enough for family audiences. The film died at the box office almost immediately and slipped quietly onto television and VHS.

Despite praise from Pauline Kael—who later included her review in Taking It All In—the film never built a following. With only one modern review listed on Rotten Tomatoes (a lukewarm but fresh 2.5/4 from Matt Brunson), it remains a cinematic orphan. Critics occasionally rediscover it, but few mainstream outlets feel compelled to revisit a small, quiet Western that never fully aligned with audience expectations.

There’s also its aesthetic problem: the film whispers when viewers expected spectacle. It rescues a minor historical curiosity and asks audiences to pay attention. That’s a risky proposition now—and it was nearly impossible in 1981.

Performances That Deserve Remembering

Though forgotten, the film contains pivotal early performances from Amanda Plummer and Diane Lane. Burt Lancaster, in one of his late-career roles, brings a weary tenderness to Bill Doolin that hints at the star he once was—still imposing, still magnetic, still capable of shifting from gentleness to threat with a flicker of expression.

Plummer’s feral, gun-toting Annie—whom Pauline Kael described as “scary brilliant”—even feels like a proto-version of her future Pulp Fiction outlaw. Lane brings the heartbreak of wide-eyed innocence learning too late that legend isn’t protection.

Why Return to This Movie Today?

Because every 80s movie has something to tell us about the moment that made it—and the myths America clings to. Cattle Annie and Little Britches is a quiet Western, almost a ghost Western, but its power lies in what it reveals about how Hollywood shapes history. If you’ve heard of Annie and Little Britches, you’ve almost certainly absorbed the softened, romanticized version shaped first by Robert Ward and then by Universal Pictures.

The truth isn’t glamorous. But it lingers. And sometimes the smallest myths say the most about who we are and what we choose to remember.

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