Ponderosa Ranch high in the Sierra Nevada, with a large ranch house in the center of it. Ben Cartwright was said to have built the original, smaller homestead after moving from New Orleans with his pregnant third wife Marie and his two sons, Adam and Hoss. The grown Adam, an architect/engineer, designed the later sprawling ranch house as depicted on TV ("Bonanza, The Philip Diedesheimer Story", Oct. 31, 1959, NBC-TV; "Bonanza: The Return", April 1993, NBC-TV). The fictional ranch was roughly a two-hour horse ride from Virginia City, Nevada. (Note: There are slight variations as to the origin of the Ponderosa Ranch,
Bonanza farms were Mexican immigrants or migrants, known as braceros. European Americans also worked as migrant laborers. Family farmers, with fewer workers to pay and less money invested in equipment, could better handle boom-and-bust cycles. By the 1890s, most bonanza farms had broken up into smaller farms. The Frederick A. and Sophia Bagg Bonanza Farm is located in southeastern corner of North Dakota. The preserved Bagg Bonanza Farm was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 2005. H. Drache, The Day of the Bonanza: A History of Bonanza Farming in the Red River Valley of the North (Lund Press, 1965) Bonanza farms