Ben Cartwright, the Fictional Cattleman Who Ran the Ponderosa on Bonanza

Who is Ben Cartwright?

Ben Cartwright is the lead character of the NBC western Bonanza, a fictional rancher who runs the Ponderosa near Virginia City, Nevada. The series was created by David Dortort, who is credited as executive producer alongside Mark Roberts, and Lorne Greene played Ben. According to the Wikipedia article on Bonanza, he is the thrice-widowed patriarch of three sons, each from a different wife.

This page profiles a character, not a real person. Everything below describes the story and the show, and the cattle operation is a creation of television.

The Cartwright family and the Ponderosa

Ben's sons are Adam, played by Pernell Roberts, Eric known as Hoss, played by Dan Blocker, and Joseph known as Little Joe, played by Michael Landon. The family cook, Hop Sing, was played by Victor Sen Yung. The household works as an ensemble, with Ben as the moral center who settles disputes and sets the ranch's course.

The ranch's name refers to the ponderosa pine, common across the western mountains. In the story it covers about a thousand square miles on the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe, and the Wikipedia entry on the Ponderosa Ranch gives the figure as about 640,000 acres. Accounts of how Ben acquired it vary across the series, later films and a spinoff.

What kind of cattle operation was it?

The Ponderosa is shown as a large timber and cattle ranch in 1860s Nevada, set roughly from 1861 in the first season to 1867 in the thirteenth. The nearest town is Virginia City, where the Cartwrights deal with Sheriff Roy Coffee. Plots often turn on the work of a big ranch: moving herds, defending range and water, and hiring and managing hands.

The show was less a technical guide to ranching than a family drama set on a ranch. It is better read as a picture of how Americans imagined a western cattle dynasty than as documentation of one.

How Bonanza was made and filmed

The series aired on NBC from 12 September 1959 to 16 January 1973. It ran 14 seasons and 431 episodes, and it was one of the first series filmed and broadcast in color, which helped RCA promote color television sets.

Most ranch scenes were filmed on a Paramount sound stage in Hollywood, with outdoor scenes shot at locations in California. Only about 15 episodes were shot at the Nevada park that later bore the Ponderosa name, because moving cast and crew there weekly was too expensive.

The Ponderosa Ranch theme park

According to the park's history page, in 1965 Bill and Joyce Anderson, who owned a small horse ranch near the fictional ranch's location, proposed a theme park after tourists kept asking where the Ponderosa was. The park opened at Incline Village, Nevada, in 1968 with a replica of the Cartwright ranch house and barn, and a Virginia City replica came later.

In 2004 the billionaire software entrepreneur David Duffield bought the land, and the park closed indefinitely that September. The property was sold for 38 million dollars in 2020.

Read more on farm.FM

If TV ranches interest you, the ranching section of farm.FM compares them with the real thing, and a farm.FM story about the Ponderosa covers the Nevada connection.