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,
Movie ranch is a movie ranch in Sonora, California, which served as a location for "Bonanza", "The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.", "Little House on the Prairie" and other productions. The outdoor sets built for "Back to the Future Part III" (1990) and used in "Bad Girls" (1994) were destroyed by a lightning strike wildfire in 1996. LINKS: The former Republic Pictures Movie Ranch off Soledad Canyon became the Walt Disney Golden Oak Ranch in 1959. The ranch is located in central Placerita Canyon near Newhall, California in the northern San Gabriel Mountains foothills. It was named for the Gold discovery by