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,
U Lazy S Ranch split some of the acreage into farms. In 1949, Lott started flying an airplane to drive the cattle and spray herbicide. In the 1950s, the land was faced with a draught. By 1954, Lott planted 1,400 acres of guar to improve the land. He was also the first Texas rancher to use a roto-pitter to break up the rangeland. Two years later, in 1956, Lott's range improvement program had worked. In 1965, Macy split her section of the ranch and renamed it the Running M Ranch. Meanwhile, the U Lazy S Ranch was managed by Lott's son, Jack Lott. By