"I always loved the fall of the year, which meant no school till after Christmas, as all us kids had to turn out, get fitted with new cotton sacks, anywhere from 8 to 4 ft long, with shoulder straps to fit each kid, then out to the cotton fields to pick cotton. The way we got paid was about 10% of what the farmer received after he had the cotton ginned, like if he received 40 cents per lb the picker received $4.00 per 100 lbs."

"The average picker can get 100-200 lbs per day. After I got to be 16-17 years old I was picking 500 lbs per day. The hardest work was hauling it to the scales. This took a little planning, like finding how much cotton it took to fill the bag and be as near the scales as possible. You wouldn't want to get too far away with a full bag and have to lug it all the way back. We'd usually pick cotton till end of the year, then start school, with new shoes and clothes."

"We lived mostly day to day, never sure where our next meal would come from, indeed we saw more meal times than meals." Saga of An Okie, by Jesse Lee Wright (1907-1991), posted on Oklahoma GenWeb

In the 1900 census, 20-year-old Elijah Holliman (called Lige) Kirkpatrick, a Tennessee native, was listed as living on a farm in Ivanhoe, Texas, an unincorporated village in Fannin County, with his parents and three siblings. The farm was rented, indicating that his parents were probably sharecroppers. According to genealogy records, he married Naomi Listz in 1904. Their first two children, Otis and Edward, were born in Fannin County; the next, Vonnie, in New Mexico. In 1910, he and Ida were sharecroppers in Lincoln Township, Oklahoma, just east of Lawton. They had five more children over the next dozen years: Ertle, Naomi (Dovey), Arvie, Frank, and Everett.

According to the Oklahoma Historical Society's Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, the Oklahoma Territory (Oklahoma became a state in 1907) experienced a huge influx of white tenant farmers starting in the 1880s. From 1900 to 1910, the number of white tenant farmers doubled. These farmers had to give one third of their grain crop and one fourth of their cotton crop to the landlord, as well as shouldering the entire cost of animals and equipment.

The City of Lawton website tells us that the town was founded in 1901, when the last of the Indian lands in the Oklahoma Territory were opened by the federal government. There was a land lottery established, resulting in over 29,000 hopeful homesteaders traveling from all over the US to register at nearby Fort Sill. Only 6,500 were selected. Perhaps Lige Kirkpatrick was one of the unlucky ones, and had to rent farmland. He would have witnessed a community struggling with a land rush for which it was unprepared. There were about 25,000 people living in tents. There were no streets or sidewalks and no utilities. The schools were overcrowded, and the water supply was inadequate and unsanitary.

In 1916, Lewis Hine found the Kirkpatricks out in the cotton fields and took three pictures. He took hundreds of photographs of farm families, some that owned, and some that rented. It was not your typical child labor situation - no factory boss, no spinning machine, no faces covered with coal dust - but still not a road paved with opportunity, especially with the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl less than a generation away. It was a hard life, but one that the Kirkpatricks would somehow endure.