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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 273754" data-attributes="member: 22">1930Clayton: I remember my daddy brought me to my first cattle auction. I think I was six or so.Abel Greeley: Jonas [Culver] had a parcel of land that [his nephew] Sam just naturally wanted.Harve Smithfield on Sam Culver: He was a fine lawyer.Extracts from Sam Culver’s diary:“February 3rd, 1930. Upped the offer to Jonas, but the old cootus still won’t budge. Jock thinks the land is worth a fortune in oil.”“February 25th, 1930. Today I got a court order to have Jonas committed to Signal Mountain Sanitarium. Had myself appointed custodian of Jonas’s estate.”Abel on Jonas: [He was] stubborn as a mule, but not crazy. A man like that, used to the outdoors, must have felt like a caged animal in that hospital. Putting him away was the same as shooting him through the heart.Extracts from Sam Culver’s diary:“March 27th, 1930. Today, as custodian of Jonas’s estate, I sold to Ewing/Culver all but forty acres of Jonas’s land. The money is in an account in his name and he’ll get a 25% royalty from all oil-producing wells. Next week, I’ll release him from the sanitarium. Neither Jock nor I wanted to do things this way, but the old codger left us no option. Anyway, now he’ll be a rich man despite himself.”“April 12th, 1930. Lord oh lord, what have we done? Jonas killed himself today.”Dave Culver, Sam’s son: Jonas made my father his sole heir. He got everything.Donna: Jonas’s property was the field that started the entire Culver/Ewing fortunes.Cliff: The Ewing fortune was founded on Digger’s skill.JR: Ewing Oil #3 — one of the first fields Daddy ever struck it big on.Digger: Now, nineteen and thirty was my year. My partner and I walked out right here in Texas, and I just followed my nose, and I said, “Here!”Cliff: My daddy is the one that found the oil the Ewings have been sucking out of the ground for all these years. Without him, they wouldn’t have a penny. They have been taking the oil and they have been taking the honours. If it weren’t for Digger Barnes, nobody would ever have even heard of Jock Ewing.Blackie Callaghan to JR: Everybody knew that Jock was overrated as an oilman. It was me and Digger Barnes that had the gift. Your daddy talked a big deal but it was always me and Digger that found the oil.Blackie to JR: Your daddy was a great oilman, maybe the greatest.Digger: Jock Ewing had the head, I had the nose. He was the smarter, I’ve never said otherwise. But without my nose, he wouldn’t have had nothing. I found the oil, he claimed it. I drilled it, he sold what bubbled up. We was partners. One needed the other. I trusted him.Rebecca Wentworth (née Burke, ex-Barnes): Digger never had a chance. Jock was too shrewd, too strong and too fast.Digger on Jock: He's been robbing me since we was partners.Cliff on the Ewings: They cheated old Digger Barnes and they laughed. Jock Ewing treated him like dirt.Cliff: The Ewings haven’t taken responsibility for anything they’ve ever done.JR on Jock and Digger: They broke up over a — I don't know what. Some say it was a deal of some kind. Some even say it was over my mama.Cliff to JR: Ewing 6 is the field that split up your daddy and mine. You see, my daddy found it, and your daddy swindled him out of it.Elena Ramos to Cliff’s daughter, Pamela: [Ewing 6 is] the land Jock Ewing took from your grandfather.Pamela Barnes to Cliff: That plot of land was robbed from your father and, because of that, I was robbed of ever having one [a father].Miss Ellie on Jock, Jason and Digger: They leased a field that Digger had had his eye on and they worked it for almost three months.JR: Between Jason, Digger and Jock, was there any one boss?Alf Brindle: Well if there was, it was Jock. Digger did the sniffing out and Jason kind of ran the crews. Yeah, Jock was heading the operation all right.Ray Krebbs: Did they ever talk about being partners?Alf: That I don’t recall. I guess it was understood. I didn’t know about them splitting it up in thirds or anything like that, but everyone just kind of took it for granted that each of them had a piece of the pie.A notation in Sam Culver’s diary: "August 8th, 1930. It looks like Jock, Jason and Digger are getting real close to oil. They'd better hit in a couple of days though or they are gonna run out of money.”Miss Ellie on Jock, Jason and Digger: The three of them were so far in debt that I thought they were going to have to get down on their knees and actually dig with their bare hands.JR: Daddy told me about that well. He said he made a vow that if it didn’t come in, he was going to stop wildcatting and open a haberdashery.Bobby: I doubt if he’d have kept that promise.Miss Ellie, looking at a picture: It’s an old photograph of Jock, Jason, Digger Barnes and Sam Culver. It looks like they’re near the discovery well in East Texas.Alf Brindle, looking at the same picture: That’s me! That’s me right up on that platform there!An inscription on the back of Digger’s copy of the same photo: “August 10 1930. Nacogdoches County. We’ve done it. Jock, Jason, Sam and me celebrating the big strike.”Jamie: They hit a gusher on the eighty-ninth day.Miss Ellie: And they paid off all their debts and I didn’t see Jock for a week. That’s how long they celebrated, the three of them.Alf: The night the well came in, we had one hell of a celebration — I mean, the loud mouth was really flowing. Me and Jason and Digger, we all got drunk as skunks and tore up the town. The sheriff threw us in the pokey for three days. Jock was smarter than the rest of us. He had a few drinks and sacked out early.Ray: So the very next day, Jock went down to register the claim?Alf: Yeah, while we was in jail. Listen, in them days, you didn’t want to wait around too long before registering a strike, you know. You had to register in person back then.Punk: Sure, I remember that gusher. I was wildcatting down in Nacogdoches County at the time right close to where the boys were. Word of that strike spread like wildfire.Front page headline of the Nacogdoches News, August 11th 1930: "RICH OIL STRIKE! Ewing Brothers And Willard Barnes Hit New Gusher"JR, looking at an old legal record: It’s dated August 11th, 1930 and it says that Jock Ewing recorded the discovery of oil and it’s in the name of the Ewing Oil Company and it lists Daddy as the sole owner.Harve, reading the same document: As of the eleventh of August of that year, Jock Ewing appears to be the only one with a claim to the strike and Ewing Oil.Jock on Ewing Oil: Hell, I started that company and ran it for many years.Bobby: Mama, you know how proud Daddy always was of Ewing Oil.JR: Ewing Oil is everything this family has stood for.Jock: I put that claim in my name to keep [Digger] from gambling his half away.Digger on Jock: And he went to register the claim and I stayed there and I drilled, and when I thought we had enough, ten times more than we could ever spend, I said “That’s a-plenty”.Jock on Digger: I come back with the claim. He’s drunk. He looks at the paper, sees my name, jumps me, tries to tear my eyes out. Digger on Jock: He looked at me and laughed in my face and said that I owned nothing, nothing at all, I even owed him some money. Jock on Digger: I was gonna give him half the money.An extract from one of Sam’s journals: “August 17th 1930. On this morning, I went out to the field and met Jock, Jason and Digger. The boys were still celebrating the big strike. Since there are two Ewings and one Barnes, they are calling the newly founded company Ewing Oil. And after they finally sobered up, I drew up an agreement between them giving them each one third ownership in the new company.”Clayton on the agreement drawn by Sam on the back of an old oil lease form: It says that the discovery well in East Texas is the first asset of the newly formed Ewing Oil company, and it also says that the well, the field and all future holdings of Ewing Oil are owned jointly in equal one third shares by Jock Ewing, Jason Ewing and Willard “Digger” Barnes and their heirs in perpetuity.Alf on the document: Does that there say that Jock gave Digger one third of Ewing Oil?Cliff: It sure does.Alf: I’ll be doggone, I guess he really done it! Jock was always saying he was afraid something might happen to him, and Jason would take over so I guess he did that so no-one could cheat Digger out of his third.Bobby: Mama, did Daddy ever talk to you about dividing the company up like that?Miss Ellie: No, he never did and I never saw a document like that either.Jamie on Jason’s copy of the document: My daddy carried it around for almost fifty years.JR: You ever go up and see Daddy [at the site]?Punk: You betcha. I jumped in the truck and drove up there to see what all the hollering was about. I found that the boys were feeling no pain. By the time I got there, all three of them had drunk up half the bootleg in the county.JR: They say anything about a partnership?Punk: Yeah, I remember them talking about it but I don’t know whether it was for real or not. I mean, I don’t know whether it was legal or just something they had talked about.Bobby: Was Sam Culver there?Punk: No, he had already gone by the time I got there. When I got there, nobody was saying anything that was very coherent. I remember Digger and Jason were trying to punch each other out and as a matter of fact, it would have been a pretty damn good fight if they hadn’t been so drunk. I didn’t stay. I had to get back and set the well I was drilling. Boy, we were eager beavers in those days - me and Jock, Jason, Digger.Ben Stivers: I, like most young bucks, tried my hand at wildcatting. Back in the thirties it was, over in East Texas, not all that far from where the Ewings hit their first big field. I never had much luck so I figured I better stick with what I knew best, so I moved back to Colorado.Digger to Jock: You took the oil wells and gave me nothing in return. You took my oil wells and my money and my sweetheart and I never got a cent for them.JR to Cliff: You know the difference between your daddy and my daddy? My daddy knew how to invest in the right talent and the right tools. He knew how to pump oil out of the ground. But your daddy claimed that he could sniff oil out of the ground, didn’t need anything but his nose. The only place his nose ever led him was Skid Row.Cliff: The Ewings drove my father to drink and left him penniless and broken.Cliff: My daddy didn’t have a mean bone in his body and in all his life, there isn’t anybody who ever tried to help him or put out their hand to him. He drank, he drank a lot. No reason for the Ewings to rob him.Alf: Round about the time Digger and Jock had their big falling out, Digger give this [a packet containing his copy of the document splitting Ewing Oil in thirds] to me. I guess he was afraid of getting drunk and losing it or something. Anyways, we parted paths along about then and the only times we saw each other after that, why, we’d start drinking and clean forget that we even had it.Harve: Jock and Jason had a falling out a long time ago. I think it was before you were born, wasn’t it, JR?</blockquote>

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