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 she died from a malady, was abruptly slain, or left with someone else. Greene appeared in all but fourteen "Bonanza" episodes. Greene was 44 years old at the beginning of the series while Pernell Roberts and Dan Blocker, who portrayed two of his sons, were both 31, only thirteen years younger. In 2007, a "TV Guide" survey listed Ben Cartwright as television's #2 favorite dad. Pernell Roberts played eldest son Adam, an architectural engineer with a university education. Adam built the impressive ranch house. Roberts disdained the assembly-line mindset of serial television (a rigid 34 episode season), and fought with