List of Oz Characters - Betsy Bobbin

Betsy Bobbin is a character whose first book appearance is in Tik-Tok of Oz (she was introduced in the 1913 stage production The Tik-Tok Man of Oz). Here she teams up with Shaggy Man and together they go to the Nome King's Caverns. In later books, she, Dorothy and Trot are constant companions and allies of Ozma. Although created as a new character, Betsy has a great deal in common with Dorothy. For example, Dorothy, who is from Kansas, washed up onto the shores of Ev with a chicken named Billina, and Betsy, who is from Oklahoma, arrives in a similar manner with a mule named Hank. Both girls are headstrong and courageous.

Betsy is usually shown as having blonde or light-brown hair, though in some illustrations it could be interpreted as red or brunette and, in The Lost Princess of Oz is said to be one year older than Dorothy Gale. Based on Trot's age (10) in The Giant Horse of Oz, she would be 12, if one accepts Ruth Plumly Thompson as an authority, as Baum said that Trot was a year younger than Dorothy. Strangely, more than one of the Oz books start or end with the people of Oz celebrating Betsy's birthday, though it has been claimed as being both in the spring (in Thompson's The Hungry Tiger of Oz) and on Halloween (in Bill Campbell and Irwin Terry's Masquerade in Oz--Campbell has acknowledged that had forgotten the spring reference in the former), although the weather in Oz is generally consistent with being in the Northern Hemisphere. Betsy is also the protagonist of Ruth Plumly Thompson's The Hungry Tiger of Oz.