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 Kings Bonanza Kings The Bonanza Kings, also called the Silver Kings, was a nickname given to the four men who started a stock brokerage called "Flood and O'Brien", more commonly known as the Bonanza Firm. Bonanza is a Spanish term, meaning a rich ore body; in 1873, after gaining control of the Consolidated Virginia Mining Company, they discovered a large vertical ore body more than 1,200 feet deep which became known as the "big bonanza". In 1871, Irish-Americans John William Mackay, James Graham Fair, James Clair Flood and William S. O'Brien, organized the Consolidated Virginia Silver Mine near Virginia City, Nevada,