Florence Owens Thompson

Mary Jane Cobb claimed she was Cherokee on her May 27, 1894, marriage record to Christie, but later testified under oath before the Dawes Commission that both of her parents were white.

While many sources claim Christie abandoned Cobb, he disputed the allegation.

Christie served three years in a federal penitentiary in Detroit, Michigan.

Florence Owens Thompson (born Florence Leona Christie; September 1, 1903 – September 16, 1983) was an American woman who was the subject of Dorothea Lange's photograph Migrant Mother (1936), considered an iconic image of the Great Depression.

The Library of Congress titled the image: "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California."

Florence Owens Thompson was born Florence Leona Christie on September 1, 1903, in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma.

Both of her parents claimed Cherokee descent.

Her father, Jackson Christie, allegedly abandoned her mother, Mary Jane Cobb, before she was born, and her mother married Charles Akman (of Choctaw descent) in the spring of 1905.

The family lived on a small farm in Indian Territory outside Tahlequah.

Cherokee Nation tribal records indicate that Jackson Christie's blood quantum was either full blood or one-half.

Aged 17, Thompson married Cleo Owens, a farmer's 23-year-old son from Stone County, Missouri, on February 14, 1921.

They soon had their first daughter, Violet, followed by a second daughter, Viola, and a son, Leroy (Troy).

The family migrated west with other Owens relatives to Oroville, California, where they worked in the saw mills and on the farms of the Sacramento Valley.

During the 1930s, the family worked as migrant farm workers following the crops in California and at times into Arizona.

Thompson later recalled periods when she picked 400 – of cotton from first daylight until after it was too dark to work.

She said: "I worked in hospitals. I tended bar. I cooked. I worked in the fields. I done a little bit of everything to make a living for my kids."

By 1931, Thompson was pregnant with her sixth child, when her husband Cleo died of tuberculosis.

Thompson then worked in the fields and in restaurants to support her six children.

In 1933, Thompson had another child, returned to Oklahoma for a time, and then was joined by her parents as they migrated to Shafter, California, north of Bakersfield.

There, Thompson met Jim Hill, with whom she had three more children.

On March 6, 1936, after picking beets in the Imperial Valley, Thompson and her family were traveling on U.S. Highway 101 towards Watsonville "where they had hoped to find work in the lettuce fields of the Pajaro Valley."

On the road, the car's timing chain snapped and they coasted to a stop just inside a pea-pickers' camp on Nipomo Mesa.

They were shocked to find so many people camping there—as many as 2,500 to 3,500.

A notice had been sent out for pickers, but the crops had been destroyed by freezing rain, leaving them without work or pay.

Years later, Thompson told an interviewer that when she cooked food for her children that day, other children appeared from the pea pickers' camp asking, "Can I have a bite?"

While Jim Hill, her partner, and two of Thompson's sons went into town to get parts to repair the car, Thompson and some of the children set up a temporary camp.

As she waited, photographer Dorothea Lange, working for the Resettlement Administration, drove up and started taking photos of Thompson and her family.

She took seven images in the course of ten minutes.

Lange's field notes for the Resettlement Administration were typically very thorough, but on this particular day she had been rushing to get home after a month on assignment, and the notes she submitted with this batch of negatives do not refer to any of the seven photographs she took of Thompson and her family.

It seems that the published newspaper reports about this camp were later distilled into captions for the series, which explains inaccuracies on the file cards in the Library of Congress.

For example, one of the file cards reads:

"Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February [sic: March] 1936."

Twenty-three years later, Lange wrote of the encounter with Thompson:

"I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food."

Troy Owens, one of Thompson's sons, recounted:

"There's no way we sold our tires, because we didn't have any to sell. The only ones we had were on the Hudson and we drove off in them. I don't believe Dorothea Lange was lying; I just think she had one story mixed up with another. Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn't have."

In many ways, Migrant Mother is not typical of Lange's careful method of interacting with her subject.

The family settled in Modesto, California, in 1945.

Well after World War II, Thompson met and married hospital administrator George Thompson.

This marriage brought her far greater financial security than she had previously enjoyed.