Bonanza, the story


The Cartwrights of Bonanza
the story of Bonanza Bonanza is a big, expensive, slickly made Western of "epic" proportions, drawing it’s source material from the era of the discovery of the Comstock lode, a "solid mountain of silver" in Virginia City, Nevada. The rich strike created silver barons in Nevada, and they in turn created havoc. The story is told from the point of view of the Cartwrights: a strong, loving and caring father and his three very different sons whose allegiance is not to silver but to the land.
Father Ben Cartwright watches over his sons, curbing their revelries, cherishing them, not only for themselves alone, but also for the fond memories of their mothers, evoked by their widely differing appearances and mannerisms. Ben has been married three times, and lost his three wives, each leaving him with a son to raise. Each wife was as different as the sons they produced. His first wife, Elisabeth, was a New Englander and the mother of hard-headed, serious Adam. Inga was Ben’s second wife and the mother of the gentle giant Eric, or - as father Ben likes to call him - Hoss. The third wife of Ben Cartwright – Marie – gave Ben the handsome and hot tempered Little Joe. The three sons are forever at each other’s throats, but when the chips are down they forget their differences and fight shoulder to shoulder to defend with "poah" the Ponderosa, their large ranch in Nevada, near Virginia City, against all threats.

Bonanza conquers the world
Bonanza was much more than a highly successfull entry in the long parade of westerns, that so captivated television audiences in the 1950s and 60s. It was a bona fide international cultural phenomenon. By the time the program left the air in 1973, after 14 years and 430 episodes, it had been seen and enjoyed by an estimated 400,000,000 viewers in 87 countries around the world. For well over a decade, the featured characters of Ben Cartwright and his sons Adam, "Hoss", and Little Joe seemed more real and familiar to their audience than the talented quartet of actors who portrayed them: Lorne Greene, Pernell Roberts, Dan Blocker and Michael Landon.

The series was the brainchild of writer-producer David Dortort. In 1959, the NBC televison network was anxious to come up with a popular western to match the great success that such shows were enjoying on its rival networks, notably "Maverick" on ABC and "Gunsmoke" on CBS. Dortort had already demonstrated his understanding of the genre by overseeing production of "The Restless Gun", a half-hour NBC series starring actor John Payne as a Civil War veteran traveling throughout the West. Dortort was given free reign to develop a new western adventure series, and he brought to the assignment twin fascinations with a particular point in U.S. history and a dramatic framework (the complex relationships between a formidable father and his children) that he felt was rife with possibilities.

Nevada, 1859
The era that intrigued Dortort was the late 1950s, particularly the discovery of the Comstock Lode and the subsequent rise of the town of Virginia City, Nevada. Incredibly rich veins of silver and gold were discovered in Western Nevada in 1859. A prospector named Henry Comstock took credit for the find (even though other miners had preceded his efforts by several years), and thus it was dubbed the Comstock Lode. The area was soon flooded with pioneers dreaming of instant wealth, and several mining camps on the site of the lode evolved into Virginia City, a rowdy and frequently dangerous frontier community. The word "bonanza" refers to any source of great wealth, particularly a rich mine, and Dortort decided to set his new program on a sprawling timberland and cattle ranch just outside Virginia City, one step removed from the greedy opportunists but close enough to the action so that he could tell the story of how rugged individualism tamed the new land through the eyes of his protagonists, the Cartwright family.

The beginning
After David Dortort assembled the cast of "Bonanza", he promptly informed NBC that he had grandiose plans indeed for this new series. He wanted "Bonanza" to be the first western televised in color, at a time (1959) when the use of color was reserved strictly for the occasional special program. The network was aghast but Dortort was determined. In the end, the success of "Bonanza" sold a lot of sets for RCA, NBC's parent company and a major manufacturer of color TV's. Also, the very expensive color process took up so much of the weekly budget taht the network, which had demanded a star-studded program, was forced to accept Dortort's less costly hand-picked cast of relative unknowns. The second revolutionary change sought by Dortort was the opportunity to shoot the series "on location". Though he lost out on that one, every year the Bonanza crew did an annual location shoot in California's Sierra
Nevada mountain range in order to collect riding footage and exterior views that would establish the scenicbeauty of the Ponderosa, the homestead of the Cartwrights. All four actors claimed to be experienced horsemen when they were cast, but in the beginning both Blocker and Landon appeared uneasy and were sent back to the stables for a refresher course.

With all the right elements finally in place, this classic television western made a calamitous debut on September 12, 1959. The critics were vicious. One damned the show as a "terrible waste of cash and color", and another thought it was ludicrously full of the, "interpersonal dramas dear to the hearts of soap opera fans."
"Bonanza" failed to make a ratings dent against its competition, the hugely popular CBS series "Perry Mason", and its future looked bleak. One NBC official dismissed those associated with the show as "inept." Fortunately, the network owned the program and had a direct financial interest in its survival. After two lackluster seasons, in 1961 it experimented by moving the show to Sunday evenings, and there "Bonanza" finally found its audience. For ten of its fourteen years "Bonanza" was consistently one of the top ten rated programs and from 1964 to 1967 it was the single most watched television program in America. So awesome was its popularity that President Lyndon Johnson was rumored to have ruled out the scheduling of television speeches during its time slot. Soon fan clubs, called "Bonanza Boosters", began springing up across the country. As the show started to be syndicated overseas, its popularity proved to be just as potent abroad. Bonanza's publicity people claimed that in certain African villages a televison set was perched in the branches of a tree once a week so the populace could visit with the Cartwrights. Once after a Royal Command Performance, Queen Elizabeth II told Lorne Greene that "Bonanza" was a weekly must-see at Buckingham Palace!

The end of Bonanza
Though Pernell Roberts (Adam Cartwright) left the show in 1965, "Bonanza" continued and became even more succesfull. Much more devastating, however, was the untimely death of actor Dan Blocker ("Hoss" Cartwright) in 1972. The death of Blocker was the beginning of the end. Ratings slipped precipitously. NBC moved the show to Tuesday nights, where its competition was "Maude", a hip situation comedy with a feminist slant that made the rustic adventures of the men of the Ponderosa seem dated and passe. When "Bonanza" was cancelled midway through its fourteenth season in 1973, those who loved it could take consolation in the fact that it had been the second longest running TV western in the history of the medium (only the redoubtable "Gunsmoke", which ran for an astonishing 20 years, could compare).
By '73 reruns of the early episodes of "Bonanza", retitled "Ponderosa" for syndication, had already been running for several years. The tradition continues today. Even as you visit this homepage, someone somewhere is tethering their favorite armchair to the hitching post at the Ponderosa and settling in for a comfortable visit with Ben, Adam, Hoss and Little Joe. The program will likely live on forever.



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