Bobby Ewing: The Southfork Ranch Son Who Kept the Cattle Side Going

Who is Bobby Ewing?

Bobby Ewing is the youngest of the Ewing brothers at Southfork in the CBS series Dallas, created by David Jacobs. According to the Emmy TV Legends page on Dallas, Patrick Duffy played Bobby from 1978 to 1985 and again from 1986 to 1991. The character was written out of the 1985-86 season and later returned.

In the show's setup, Bobby is the Ewing who runs the cattle side of Southfork, while his brother J. R. runs Ewing Oil. That makes him the fiction's best-known ranch hand with a family name.

Bobby and the cattle side of Southfork

The Ewings live together at Southfork, the family ranch, with Ewing Oil as the family business. Bobby's role is the cattle operation: a counterweight to his brother's oil politics and a link to the family's ranching roots.

Real Texas ranch families often split duties in a similar way, with one heir managing the herd and another handling minerals or finance. The series dramatizes that arrangement as sibling rivalry, so use it as a story model, not a management manual.

The long run of Dallas

Dallas ran 330 episodes, from the April 1978 pilot season on CBS to the final episode in May 1991. The pilot earned ratings that put it in the top ten by the end of its limited run. The Wikipedia entry on Dallas gives episode lists and cast changes.

A ranch character who disappears from a long-running series and comes back a season later is rare, and it says something about how much the producers relied on him as the show's steady figure. Bobby's temporary exit and return became one of the series' best-known plot turns. The Emmy TV Legends page notes only that he was written out of the 1985-86 season and later came back.

Bobby against J. R.

The central contrast in the Ewing family is between J. R., described as a villain viewers loved to hate, and Bobby, who plays the steadier brother. The feud with the Barnes family over oil fields gave both brothers something to defend.

Their rivalry also reflects a real pattern in family operations: land and cattle are passed down within a family, while oil and gas leases bring cash and conflict. Brothers who share a ranch but pursue different businesses can find themselves pulling in opposite directions, and the series turns that tension into weekly drama. For a quick profile of the main antagonist, see the entry for J. R. Ewing on this site, which also notes how the Ewings' Southfork home ties oil to ranch tradition. The Wikipedia article on J. R. Ewing covers the character from the opposing side.

Learn more about Texas ranch families

The farm.FM ranching section covers real ranch families and their operations. For related reading, try a farm.FM story about Texas ranch families. Miss Ellie, who holds the family together, is profiled separately.