Week after week, Ben Cartwright sat at the head of the table with three grown sons who looked nothing alike, and anyone watching Bonanza could do the math. Adam, Hoss and Little Joe were half brothers, each the son of a different wife, and all three women were gone before the first episode aired in 1959. The short answer to what happened to them is a sad one. Elizabeth died soon after giving birth to Adam, Inger was killed by an arrow on the trail west when Hoss was only weeks old, and Marie was thrown from a horse when Joe was five.
The show took its time telling us. Across three seasons, from 1961 to 1963, Bonanza gave each mother her own flashback episode, with Lorne Greene’s Ben remembering the courtship that came before the loss. Three fine actresses played Ben Cartwright’s wives, and only one of the three women ever made it home to the Ponderosa.
Why Did Ben Cartwright Need Three Wives?
The answer starts with what creator David Dortort was trying to build. Westerns of the 1950s were crowded with lone gunmen, and Dortort wanted the opposite. “I broke the tradition of the Western hero as a rootless, homeless wanderer with no family who went out with the sunset,” he told the Associated Press in 1973, explaining that he wanted a strong father and a family bound by respect and love.
That family was built without a woman in the house. When TV Guide profiled the show in June 1960, Dortort put it bluntly. “We do not have any Moms built into our show, or, for that matter, any women,” he said. “We are, as it were, anti-Momism.” It was a jab at the sitcoms of the day, where Dad usually got into trouble and Mom bailed him out.
We could not find Dortort explaining in his own words why Ben had to be widowed three times rather than once. What the show itself makes clear is the payoff. Giving each son a different mother gave each one a different heritage, English for Adam, Swedish for Hoss and French Creole for Joe, which is why the cool, bookish eldest, the gentle giant and the hothead never seemed to come from the same mold. The writers then spent three seasons filling in who those women were.
Who Was Adam’s Mother, And What Happened To Her?
The first flashback came at the end of season two. In “Elizabeth, My Love,” which aired May 27, 1961, Adam falls seriously ill and Ben, waiting at his bedside, remembers the young woman who gave him his first son. She was Elizabeth Stoddard, the daughter of Abel Stoddard, the New England captain Ben had served under as a young sailor.
Their happiness was brief. Elizabeth died of complications shortly after Adam was born, as Remind Magazine recounted in its look at the show’s ill-fated women, and the widowed Ben set out west with a baby boy.
Geraldine Brooks played Elizabeth. She was a stage and screen actress with real credentials, earning an Emmy nomination in 1962 and a Tony nomination in 1970, and she later married On the Waterfront writer Budd Schulberg. Brooks died on June 19, 1977, at just 51. Ben, meanwhile, had a long road ahead of him, and the next woman he met would change the family’s story most of all.
How Did Hoss Get His Name?
On his way west, Ben stopped in Illinois and fell for a Swedish woman named Inger Borgstrom, who took to little Adam as if he were her own. “Inger, My Love” told that courtship on April 15, 1962, and Dortort himself shared the teleplay credit with Frank Cleaver. Inga Swenson played Inger with such warmth that her leading man did not want to let her go. “Inga is such a wonderful girl,” Greene told The Birmingham News in 1963, in a quote later recalled by MeTV. “I wonder: why do we have to get rid of her?”
The show brought her back once more. “Journey Remembered,” which aired November 10, 1963, finds Ben reading an old journal from the wagon train that carried him, Inger and little Adam from St. Joseph, Missouri, toward Ash Hollow in Nebraska. Their baby was born on that trail. Inger named him Eric after her own father, but young Adam had a nickname in mind, and she explained it with a smile. “In the mountain country, that is the name for a big, friendly man,” she said of “Hoss.” The two names were left to see which one would stick, and we all know how that turned out.
The trip ended in tragedy. During a fight with raiders at the Ash Hollow way station, Inger was struck and killed by an arrow, leaving Ben with two motherless boys. Swenson, already a Tony-nominated Broadway star, went on to seven seasons as the cook Gretchen Kraus on Benson, and she died in Los Angeles on July 23, 2023, at 90, as Variety reported.
Which Mother Finally Made It To The Ponderosa?
Ben pushed on to Nevada with Adam and Hoss, and the ranch they built there is the one you can still picture on that burning map in the opening credits. (We dug into where the Ponderosa property was supposed to be in an earlier story.) Then business took him to New Orleans, and there he met Marie DeMarigny.
“Marie, My Love” aired February 10, 1963, with Felicia Farr as the spirited French Creole beauty who became the third Mrs. Cartwright. It was Farr’s only turn on the show, but her Marie was the one wife who came home to the Ponderosa and raised a family there. She gave Ben his youngest son, Joseph, and for a few years the house was full.
It did not last. Marie was thrown from a horse when Joe was five, and the fall killed her.
The Saturday Evening Post once summed up the pattern in a single line: “It wasn’t safe to be a woman around the Ponderosa.” Over 14 seasons, the Cartwright men courted plenty of women, and almost none of them stuck around.
Who Is Still Here To Remember Them?
The men who played the sons are all gone now. Dan Blocker died in 1972 while the show was still on the air, Lorne Greene in 1987, Michael Landon in 1991 and Pernell Roberts, the last of the Cartwright men, in 2010.
Of the three women who played their mothers, one remains. Felicia Farr, born Olive Dines in Westchester County, New York, turned 94 on October 4. She married Jack Lemmon in Paris in 1962 while he was filming Irma la Douce, stayed by his side until his death in 2001, and played opposite Glenn Ford in 3:10 to Yuma. Her time on the Ponderosa lasted a single hour of television in 1963. Yet she is the last living link to the three women Ben Cartwright loved, and to the only mother who ever got to stand on that porch and watch her son ride in.
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