Bonanza made its TV debut in 1959 and was a smash hit for fourteen years, ranking only second as the most popular western of all time after Gunsmoke.  The story centered on a father raising three sons on the Ponderosa ranch, a huge spread on the shores of Lake Tahoe in Nevada.  Ben Cartwright, the father, was Lorne Greene:  He died from an ulcer at age seventy-two in 1987.  Two of the three sons died young:  The middle son, Hoss, played by Dan Blocker, a 6-foot-3, 300 pound, good natured guy on and off screen died in 1972 at age forty-three of a pulmonary embolism after routine gall bladder surgery.  The youngest son, Little Joe, played by Michael Landon, later went on to star in Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven.  Landon died at age fifty-four in 1991 of pancreatic cancer.  Married three times, with nine children, he is remembered most for how he publicly faced news of his fatal illness with an unusual frankness.  Blocker’s type of embolism and Landon’s cancer are often caused by exposure to chemicals, frequently from too much contact with butoxyethanol, a chemical in many household cleaning products.  It seems likely that both actors breathed air or had skin contact with the chemical while on the set of Bonanza. The family cook, Chinese immigrant Hop Sing, played by Victor Sen Yung also died from exposure to chemicals, this time from his real-life kitchen:  He died in 1980 at age sixty-five due to carbon-monoxide poisoning, stemming from a gas leak in a household appliance.  

The three top television westerns were Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, and Have Gun Will Travel.  Gunsmoke featured Marshal Matt Dillon, modeled on Wyatt Earp.  Howard McNear played morbid Doc Charles Adams:  He died of a stroke in 1969 at age sixty-three.  Georgia Ellis was the prostitute Kitty Russell on Gunsmoke:  She died in 1988 at age seventy-one of AIDS, acquired after she married a bisexual younger husband.  Wagon Train was a weekly drama portraying a clean-cut version of post-Civil War America’s journey westward, featuring Ward Bond as Major Seth Adams.  He died in 1960 at age fifty-seven of a heart attack.  Have Gun Will Travel was about a professional gunfighter named Paladin, played by Richard Boone and Kim “Hey Boy” Chan by Kam Tong:  Boone holstered his six-shooter for a good as a result of cancer in 1981 at age sixty-three.  Tong bowed out a sixty-two, going in 1969 of heart failure. 

Barbed wire doesn’t seem like such an important invention today, but it once played an integral part in the development of the American West.  Joseph Glidden’s 1873 invention closed down the open ranges and placed cattle on well-defined lots of private plains and wide-open country was cordoned off with spikey wire, which effectively ended the era of the cowboy.  Glidden, through barbed wire, became one of the richest men of his time.  However, he died from an infection from an unhealed cut, much the way his invention had injured many handling it and the animals caught in its web.  Upon his death, his body was shipped in a special ice-cooled train coach.  His final wish was that he be buried far from the dusty plains where his Texas headquarters were located to lie eternally like a gentleman in a gravesite in New York. 

Pocahontas, a nickname meaning “little spoiled one,” was born Amonute, daughter of Chief Powhatan in 1595.  She was an extrovert from a young age, inquisitive and naturally good-natured.  At eleven years old she played a minor role in securing John Smith’s survival.  Later she was the go-between for trade among the settlers and Indians bartering at Jamestown.  The fictionalized version of her love affair with Smith may, in fact, bear some truth, but in a much more disturbing way for our modern sensibility.  Today, a thirty-year-old having sex with a preteen is pedophilia and a crime.  But, in that era, intercourse with non-Christian pagans of any age was not considered wrong.  Pocahontas was known to have “long, private conversations” with Smith during her frequent visits to the Jamestown complex, yet the true dimensions of these encounters are a matter of conjecture.  A few years later she was betrothed to the older Englishman John Rolfe, only after she agreed to be baptized in 1614.  Rolfe took her to London, where she was received as a celebrity, billed as a real Indian princess by high society, and held an audience with King James.  In 1617 she believed the smoky air of London was the cause of her coughs and bouts of weakness and wished to return to the forests she had known.  Along with Rolfe she boarded a ship to return to Virginia, but the vessel only made it to the end of the Thames River before it turned back.  Pocahontas died in London at age twenty-two of a disease called the king’s evil, a form of tuberculosis characterized by swelling of the lymph glands.