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.”