Imaginary Wild West: Creator of the Bonanza Ponderosa Map has Died

Robert Temple Ayres, the artist who painted the original Ponderosa map featured on the TV show Bonanza, has died. The Autry Center blog reports that he passed away on February 25 in Los Angeles at the age of 98.

As for his painting of the Ponderosa map that opens the credits to Bonanza, the NBC series that ran from September 1959 to February 1973, for years it was one of the most recognized maps in the world. Audiences saw it briefly appear every week before it burst into flames and dissolved into a shot of the members of the Cartwright family on horseback, as the twangy theme played. It was donated by the family of David Dortort, the show’s producer, and has been hanging in the Autry’s Imagination Gallery since May 201Even though Ayers worked with some of the biggest names in the business, including Elvis Presley at the peak of his fame, the artist never took the Hollywood hoopla seriously. He didn’t know the map had survived the series until shortly before he came to see it with his family in July. As a family member led him to it in his wheelchair, he exclaimed his surprise. “Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Ayres said.”I had no idea where that had gone.”

Imaginary Wild West -- the Bonanza Map

Map/Photo: Autry Collections

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Autry National Center in Los Angeles now displays one of the most potent icons of the post-World War II imaginary wild west -- the map of the fictional Ponderosa ranch that was displayed and set on fire at the beginning of every episode of the long-running and internationally popular TV show Bonanza.

The map -- which has been hung in the Autry's "Imagination Gallery" -- charts a  place that doesn't exist but is recognized and even beloved by millions world wide. As the Autry blog puts it:

NBC audiences from September 1959 to February 1973 saw this map every week in the opening credits of the Paramount Television show. It would appear briefly before it burst into flames, dissolving into a shot of all four members of the Cartwright family, astride their horses, as the memorable theme played.

“We’re talking 14 seasons, 431 episodes,” said Jeffrey Richardson, associate curator of western history and popular culture at the Autry. “Just those numbers alone are staggering. But at the beginning of every single episode, and the theme song that so many people can hum, it all began with a shot of this particular map.”

The burning map was a high spot for viewers, but Richardson notes that it actually was drawn with an incorrect geographical orientation.

The map is a beauty, hand-drawn in intense colors for Bonanza creator David Dortort by Robert Temple Ayres, a company employee. But it has a flaw.

When Ayres drew the map, he evidently thought that a fictional ranch didn’t need a terribly accurate map. So he drew Reno to the west of Carson City. Dortort noticed.

“They put it together; they brought it to David Dortort; he looked at it,” Richardson said. “He said, ‘I love it, but your directions are wrong.’”

Looking at it as it was designed, the map shows Reno to the west of Carson City. In reality, Reno sits to the north. To fix it, Ayres drew a compass. But instead of the north arrow pointing straight up as on most maps, it goes off in a vaguely west-northwest direction. To look at the map in its correct orientation, one would have to flip it on its side, with the “horn” of the property pointing upward.

“To justify the inaccurate locations the way they had them drawn, they had to slant the compass a different way,” Richardson said. “It was too late at that particular time in 1959 for them to redo the map, because again, it was hand-drawn, and they were going to start shooting the opening sequence."

Read more by clicking HERE


 Dortort had donated most of his papers and memorabilia to the Autry a year or so before his death last September at the age of 93. He had held on to the map however. After he died, his family gave it and other objects to the museum.

Bonanza -- international appeal

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Autry Museum's Libraries blog runs a revealing post illustrating the international appeal of the TV show Bonanza.

It is based on material in the archives of David Dortort, the pioneering creator and produce of Bonanza, who died in September and who left his papers to the Autry National Center's library.

International magazines also celebrated Bonanza’s popularity and high quality production. Belgian weekly radio and television magazine Humo rated the show #1 in its 1966 annual poll. The David Dortort Archive is packed with magazines from around the world, with a particular strength in publications from European countries.

 The blog post features magazine covers in languages including

German:

From the Autry Libraries  blog: A Cartwright for Every Woman

And Vietnamese:

From the Autry Libraries blog: 1969

More on David Dortort, the Creator of Bonanza

"Bonanza" snack bar, train station, Lodz, Poland, 2005. photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I have an article in Tablet Magazine today, in which I write about David Dortort, the creator of the iconic TV show Bonanza, who died in September -- I wrote about his death in an earlier post -- and tell the story the related to me about how his Uncle Harry fought with Pancho Villa....

Some years ago, when I first visited Sikluv Mlyn, a Wild West theme park in the Czech Republic, I was startled by the music piped in to the lobby of my hotel. It was the unmistakable theme song from the iconic TV show Bonanza–sung in Czech.

Bonanza, which ran from 1959 to 1973, recounted the adventures of the tight-knit Cartwright clan—the patriarch Ben, his three sons Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe—and the goings-on at their sprawling Ponderosa ranch. Syndicated to dozens of countries and dubbed into languages ranging from German to Japanese, it was one of the most popular and widely watched television shows of all time and has had a tremendous impact in honing the image of the American West around the world.
But few viewers realize how deeply rooted the show was in, well, Yiddishkeit (and not just because two of the stars—Lorne Greene as Ben and Michael Landon as Little Joe—were Jewish).

Bonanza was the brainchild of David Dortort, a pioneering television writer and producer who died in September at the age of 93. The Brooklyn-born son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Dortort had a lifelong commitment to Jewish causes; among other things, he and his wife Rose, who died in 2007, endowed cultural programs at the American Jewish University and Hillel at UCLA.

I discussed the Jewish underpinnings of Bonanza with Dortort during a lengthy interview at his home in Los Angeles in December 2004, as part of my ongoing research on the American West in the European imagination.

Read full story HERE

Obituary -- David Dortort, creator of BONANZA

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Photo: Autry National Center

David Dortort, the pioneering television producer who created the iconic western show Bonanza, died Sunday at the age of 93.

The Autry National Center runs a lengthy obituary of him on its blog. I had the pleasure and privilege of conducting a lengthy interview with Dortort when I was a Visiting Scholar at the Autry -- I do not have a copy of the interview with me at the moment, but when I do I will post some excerpts. Meanwhile, you can watch a three hour interview with him conducted in 2002 for the Archive of American Television by clicking HERE

Bonanza, a ground-breaking "adult western" that focused on the life of a family of men on the Ponderosa ranch near Virginia City, was one of the most popular TV westerns of all time -- shown in dozens of countries and dubbed into local languages.

Considered Dortort’s most important work, “Bonanza” became one of the most popular and the second longest-running western on television, with 425 episodes airing from 1959 to 1973. The family saga of thrice-widowed Nevada rancher Ben Cartwright, his disparate sons, and their vast landholdings also was the first of a new genre at the time — the adult western.

“Prior to that particular time, most of the Westerns that you saw on TV were geared toward children,” said Jeffrey Richardson, the Autry’s associate curator of film and popular culture. “These were shows like ‘The Gene Autry Show,’ ‘Roy Rogers,’ ‘Sky King,’ those types of shows, which were very simplistic in their message.”

With the adult Western, Richardson said, television was able to tackle more controversial issues and social themes — topics that resonated more with what was going on in the United States in the1960s, rather than in the 1870s.

“The issues that they’re dealing with in the standard ‘mission of the week’ were issues that were relevant to people in the 1960s,” Richardson said. “Gender was one. Race. Society and the role of the ‘big guy.’ “

I remember that when I checked into the "Colorado" hotel on my first visit to the Skluv Mlyn wild west town in the Czech Republic, the theme song from Bonanza was being played in the background -- sung in Czech.

Similarly, Dortort's papers, which he donated to the Autry, include fan letters -- one of them is from  a German filmmaker in Berlin

"who tells Dortort he was walking along the Wall on the West side one day when he heard someone on the East side whistling the theme to “Bonanza.” “He talked about the irony of it,” said Marva Felchlin, director of the Autry Library. “That says something about the allure of the West.”

Imaginary Wild West -- "Adam Cartwright" RIP

 The Bonanza cafe at the train station in Lodz, Poland, 2005. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The actor Pernell Roberts has died at the age of 81. Though he chafed at the role -- and quit at the height of his popularity, he was  best known to millions of fans around the world  as Adam Cartwright, one of the three sons of patriarch Ben Cartwright on the seminal and wildly popular TV western, Bonanza - which first went on the air in 1959. He was the last of the four Cartwrights to pass on.

I am including a link here to Roberts' obituary as it appeared in the British newspaper The Guardian,
as the popularity of Bonanza spanned the globe. I vividly recall hearing the theme song -- sung in Czech -- playing at the Colorado Hotel on my first visit to the Sikluv Mlyn Wild West theme park in the Czech Republic.

There are certain actors who are forever defined by one role, some to their pleasure and others to their displeasure. Pernell Roberts, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 81, was definitely of the latter ilk. Roberts, who played Adam Cartwright in Bonanza for 202 episodes from 1959 until 1965, thought himself capable of far greater things, and left the television horse opera at the height of his, and the show's, popularity.

With complete but refreshing disregard for his multitude of loyal fans, Roberts explained why he left the show "I had six seasons of playing the eldest son on that show. Six seasons of feeling like a damned idiot, going around like a middle-aged teenager saying, 'Yes, Pa' 'No, Pa' on cue. It was downright disgusting – such dialogue for a grown man. I felt I wasn't being taken seriously as an actor, and that's like death to one's talent. Stuck as Adam Cartwright, I was only able to use about one-tenth of my ability."

Despite his extremely negative views of Bonanza [...] and of the character of Adam Cartwright, Roberts's dependable demeanour – tall, dark and handsome features and deep baritone voice – brought much-needed gravitas to the enjoyable and lively familial adventures on the Ponderosa ranch.

          Read full obit here

 Bonanza in fact was popular all over the world, wherever the flickering TV screen lit up livingrooms and served as an alternative family hearth.

"Whenever you are puzzled about why boys  today no longer read books,  the actor Pernell Roberts should come to mind," read his obituary in Germany's Die Welt. "For the book-reading, cool, always dressed in black Adam, whom he played for six years in the legendary Western television series Bonanza, embodied a role model for many boys in the 1960s."