Long Suit

Decided last week, just 24 days less than a year after it began, was the longest court trial ever held in Texas. Involving big Humble Oil & Refining Co. and 5,000 little claimants, the trial was as picturesque as an old explorer's diary. It was so complicated that Court Reporter G. L. Dahl filled 327 notebooks with almost 5,000,000 words of testimony, accumulated so many exhibits that he finally took to hauling them to the courtroom by wheelbarrow (see cut). At stake was the ownership of 495 acres of Montgomery County oil land estimated to be worth $30,000,000.

In 1838 Texas originally gave title to the land in question to an illiterate young Southerner named Wilson Strickland who had migrated west, presumably had fought in the Texas revolution. The tract was hilly, bone-dry, good for nothing except a scrubby growth of pine, and Strickland never bothered with it. He left Montgomery County, vanished into mists of hearsay; some people said he had been shot to death. In 1847 a Portuguese freebooter and slave trader named Allen Vince sued him for a $200 debt, got a judgment against the land. But Vince never bothered with it either.

When oil was discovered in 1932, nobody knew who really owned the land. In association with some other oil companies, Humble bought up leases based on one deed, of doubtful origin, which had been ticking around Texas for 40 years. The company also tracked down some 60 descendants of old Allen Vince, paid them $300,000, gave them royalty rights. But Bumble's lawyers were still worried about Wilson Strickland. They cut off the Vinces' royalty payments, invited them to start a lawsuit which would settle title for once & all, advertised for heirs of Wilson Strickland to join in the suit.

The advertisement produced startling results. When the trial began in Conroe, some 5,000 people claimed to be heirs. They traced their family lines back to various different Wilson Stricklands who had migrated to Texas from the Southeast, tried to prove that their Wilson Strickland was the right one. As evidence they introduced 1,000 Bibles with family histories on the flyleaves, old letters, snuff boxes, muskets, a muzzle-loading shotgun, other heirlooms.

One plaintiff dug up the coffin in which her Wilson Strickland had been buried, took the rotted wood to court, tried to prove that it had come from a Mongomery County pine tree. Most amazing witness was Mrs. Anne Stuart Snow, a Strickland descendant from Lewisville, Ark., who testified that her family's Bible had been destroyed by fire in 1896 when she was eleven years old. She said she recalled 160 pictures and biographies in the Bible, described the photographs in detail, said that Wilson Strickland's picture had been torn out of the lower left-hand corner of page two after he had quarreled with his father. Opposing attorneys tried for two days to cross-question her into inconsistencies, had no luck at all. One woman claimed that Wilson Strickland was buried in her family graveyard in New Orleans beside Napoleon Bonaparte and John Paul Jones.

The jury of farmers and stockmen listened to about 400 witnesses, more than 100 depositions (one of which took four days to read). Jury fees ($21 a week) totaled more than $11,000. In the course of the trial the court bailiff died; one juror became a father ; two became grandfathers.

Last week the jurymen listened to the last argument, retired to ponder the long dim trail of the Wilson Stricklands, the conflicting claim of Allen Vince's clan.

After three .days they returned a verdict that made 5,000 people very sad: none of the litigating Stricklands was a descendant of the right Wilson Strickland; the Vinces had no legal claim. Result: Humble Oil and its associates controlled the property, would not have to pay the claimants a cent.

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