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, Arkansas Bonanza, Arkansas Bonanza is a city in Sebastian County, Arkansas, United States. It is part of the Fort Smith, Arkansas-Oklahoma Metropolitan Statistical Area. At the 2010 Census, the population of Bonanza was 575. According to the 2005 US Census Bureau estimates, the population of Bonanza was 544. Bonanza began as a coal mining town of the "Central Coal and Coke company". On October 10, 1851, "Sebastian County" was created from parts of Crawford, Polk, and Scott County Arkansas placing Bonanza within the boundaries. Coal was discovered near the Arkansas-Oklahoma line about 12 miles southeast of Fort Smith. The "Central Coal