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. 

Clayton Moore played the masked cowboy riding high on his horse Silver in the TV favorite The Lone Ranger during the early fifties.  With the help of the wise, quiet Indian Tonto, played by Jay Silverheels, the duo went about righting injustices in over one hundred episodes.  Moore had the odd fate for an actor of wearing a mask onscreen so that even during the fame of the show, he was hardly recognized.  Perhaps for this, there is no other actor who clung to his role do diligently, regularly donning the mask and costume to go out in public, some say even while in his car at a drive-through for fast-food.  He was seen wearing his Lone Ranger costume shortly before his death of a heart attack in 1999 at age eighty-five.  Silverheels took much less affinity to his role as Tonto and passed away quickly, though coughing laconically, at age sixty in 1980, of pneumonia. 

As railroad building brought desperadoes into Wyoming, citizens there found use for many ropes.  Several bandits and killers were set swinging in and around Cheyenne and Laramie in 1868.  Where the trees were not available, a telegraph pole served for scaffold.  That was the case with the stringing up of Dutch Charley at Carbon and George Parrot (“Big Nose George”) at Rawlins.  Idaho also attracted horse thieves, stagecoach robbers and killers who had to be eradicated.  Vigilance committee at Payette and Boise did this with dispatch.  The most notorious man strung up by the Boise group was David Updyke, leader of a desperado gang, who had been able to win an election for sheriff of Ada County.  With Updyke and several of his men out of the way, the Idaho crime wave subsided.  It’s amazing what happens as a result of a public hanging.  Chapter three of The Plea will be on the website next week.  Visit www.chrisenss.com.

In Nevada, where highwaymen were active, Egan, Hamilton, Treasure City and other towns organized protective associations with written rules.  Aurora formed one in 1864 after about thirty citizens had lost their lives by violence in three years.  The vigilantes caught four of the outlaws, built a scaffold in front of the armory and placed four nooses.  When the governor heard what was going on and wired an inquiry, the United States marshal replied, “Everything quiet in Aurora.  Four men to be hanged in fifteen minutes.”  Then, as a crowd watched, the four stretched rope.  At Dayton, Carson, Virginia City, and elsewhere, vigilance committees, remained at worked for a decade or longer.  In Colorado, outlaws often were sent to the next world in economy-sized packages.  Near Sheridan a committee strung four desperadoes from a railroad bridge.  On the Denver and Cheyenne road to the north, seven bandits were dropped from another trestle.  Denver miners formed a people’s court in 1859 and hanged from a cottonwood a prospector who had killed another for his gold.  The next year the same court strung up four killers.  The most remembered was James Gordon, who had killed a man for refusing to drink with him at a bar.  His hanging was witnessed by several thousand, whom the mounted Jefferson Rangers kept in order.  Most of the Colorado mining camps organized people’s courts in the 1860’s.  One historian noted that such courts “were about the only ones thoroughly respected and obeyed.”  Their proceedings were open and orderly, he said.  “They approached the dignity of a regularly constituted tribunal.  The prisoner had counsel and could call witnesses if the latter were within reach. 

Once in San Antonio, recalls Colonel Jack Potter in Floyd Streeter’s The Kaw, he applied to Ab Blocker for a job.  The famous trail boss asked him: “Can you ride a pitching bronc?  Can you rope a horse out of the remuda without throwing the loop around your own head?  Are you good natured?  In case of a stampeded at night, would you drift along in front or circle the cattle to a mills? …Just one more question: can you sing?”  As Jack Potter learned to his dismay, the cattle couldn’t stand his singing.  Every time he went on guard and san, the cattle would get up and mill around the bed ground.  But as soon as Ab Blocker began singing, the cattle commenced to lie down.  Potter was fired.  Another old-timer , Edward Charles Abbott was more successful.  He could not only sing but also make up verses – “anything that came into your head.”  He had a hand in composing the Ogallaly Song”, as he tells in We Pointed Them North.  This was “just made up as the trail went north by men singing on night guards, with a verse for every river on the trail,” starting form the Nueces in Texas and ending with the Yellowstone in Montana.  “When I first heard it it only went as far as Ogallaly on the South Platte, which is why I called it the Ogallaly song.”  Considering that so few cowboys could sing and that it wasn’t the quality of the singing that counted – just the reassuring sound of a familiar voice or even a humming or whistling or yodeling – it is a wonder that cowboy songs are as good as they are.  As a matter of fact, most cowboy songs, especially cowboy ballads, were written by known cowboy poets, to older tunes.  Everyone sing along with me “As I was walking one morning for pleasure, I spied a young cow puncher riding alone, his hat was thrown back and his spurs was a jingling as he approached me a singing this song.  Whoop-ee ti-yi-yo, git along little dogies, it’s your misfortune and none of my own.  Whoop-ee ti-yi-yo, git along little dogies, for you know Wyoming will be your new home.” 

In many a mining camp and cattle range, vigilantes did more to drive out desperadoes than did elected officials.  The committees of vigilance were formed because there was no other effective action against crime.  The vigilance committees of the West differed from the lynchers of the South in that, instead of circumventing the law, they enforced it.  They had a large hand in making the frontier communities from anarchy and bridged the gap between lawlessness and the formal administration of justice that came later.  Frontiersmen who found a horse thief or two dangling from the limb of a tree did not automatically conclude that justice had been violated.  Action by the vigilance committee not only was swifter and surer than that of some of the feeble courts but often was fairer.  Proceedings of these committees were informal-more so in some instances than in others.  But the committees were organized only after conditions had become desperate, and the men they punished were usually those whose guilt was clear beyond doubt.  If this were the Old West I know exactly who I’d like to invite to a necktie party

The Rosebud Vigilantes were one of the most notorious vigilante groups of the Old West.