Bleak Hoss

As I continued my couch-bound channel-surfing, I landed about 15 minutes into the first of three Bonanza episodes on TV Land. What I saw made me stick around for the whole show, and ultimately I watched all three.

I was not a Bonanza fan as a child, but the burning map that opened each episode seared itself into my memory. The premature death of Dan Blocker in 1972 was one of the earliest celebrity deaths I was aware of, and I remember the controversy over Bonanza continuing for another season without him. I also remember being puzzled by the fact that it was called Bonanza in the prime time, but the Sunday afternoon reruns were called Ponderosa.

What caught my attention was the sight of actor Jonathan Harris (you know him as the strange and sometimes evil Dr. Zachary Smith on Lost in Space), sporting chin whiskers and in the Virginia City jail. Playing a snooty Englishman, he was called "Mr. Dickens" by the other characters.

Yes, believe it or not, there was an episode of Bonanza featuring Charles Dickens as a guest at the Ponderosa. The episode's title was "A Passion for Justice," and its subject was copyright law and piracy. (That link leads to the Internet Movie Database entry about the episode, and in the user comments there is a good synopsis of the story and its background in real life; just overlook the constant misspelling of "copy-write.") Dickens did make a couple of tours of America, including a few years after the Civil War, and there were problems with mutual recognition of copyright between America and Britain.

In the episode, Dickens is giving a dramatic reading of Oliver Twist in Virginia City, but stops abruptly and angrily when he learns that the local newspaper publisher has been printing bootleg copies of his Old Curiosity Shop. When the print shop is vandalized that night, the townsfolk assume that Dickens is the culprit, and that is how he lands in jail.

Ben Cartwright knows Dickens isn't guilty, but the author is too proud to put up a defense at his trial. Adam and Little Joe do some detective work and catch the real vandal, Dickens is reconciled to the townsfolk and vice versa, and the episode ends with him completing his interrupted reading, followed by his recital of the Declaration of Independence as an encore.

The heart of the episode is a conversation between Dickens and Hoss, as they take a break from chopping wood at the Ponderosa. Hoss tries to explain to Dickens that the townsfolk aren't going to treat him like a king because he's a famous author back in England: "Folks around here judge a man by what he is, not what he was." Hoss tells Dickens that folks don't understand all his fuss about the copies of his book.

Dickens explains his outrage in terms Hoss can understand. Ben Cartwright built the Ponderosa from nothing, and he and his sons would defend it against anyone who would try to take it away from them. In the same way, Dickens' words represent his sweat and blood, and they're just as dear to him as the Ponderosa is to the Cartwrights. Later Ben lectures the townsfolk after Dickens' trial, calling the unauthorized copies a "rustling of his rights."

Piracy probably wasn't much of an issue back in 1963, when the episode first aired, but in this age of peer-to-peer file sharing, that's a message worth remembering.

The second episode I saw is worth a mention, too: "Rain from Heaven", guest-starring character actor John Anderson as a rainmaker named Tulsa Weems. (Seems fitting. One of the most dishonest and shifty people I ever met was from Tulsa.) Weems brings his wagon to drought-stricken Virginia City. He convinces several leading citizens to pay him to make rain, but they need Ben Cartwright's deep pockets to have enough for Weems' $200 fee. Cartwright doesn't believe in rainmakers; he sent Adam to buy some water-wagons to fetch water from Lake Tahoe for his ranch and the town.

Weems also has a very sick daughter, but as a proud mountain man, he refuses all charity. His rebuff of Ben's offer of a loan is violent enough to land him in jail, which entitles his family to be put up in the hotel at the town's expense. But his family is just as proud as their pa, and they run away to squat in the Cartwrights' barn. (They figure Ben owes them for refusing Tulsa Weems a chance to earn an honest day's work.)

Hoss demonstrates sacrificial love by snatching the girl out of the barn, over the objections of her proud mother and shotgun-toting brother. He nurses her in his room, using cool cloths to bring down her fever despite the risk of catching her typhoid fever.

Weems finally gets a chance to try his rainmaking techniques. He fires his cannon and shoots off skyrockets, but all in vain. The sky remains clear and dry, and he has failed, as he put it, to knock the devil out of the sky. Weems says that the devil has won, and the rain that might have brought relief to the land and health to his daughter would not come.

Ben rebukes Weems for using the devil as a convenient scapegoat for his own failures, and this is where the episode takes a surprising turn, surprising at least to a 21st century TV viewer. In poetic language, Ben calls on Weems to pray for his daughter. (I wish I'd recorded this so I could give you the exact quote.) After Weems' daughter recovers and the rains return a few days later, Weems chides Ben Cartwright for not believing in rainmakers. Ben's reply: "Oh, I believe in a Rain Maker: the one you were praying to last night."

After watching these two episodes (and a third, the Serlingesque "Twilight Town"), it's easy to understand why this series was so beloved. While too much of any kind of TV is a bad thing for children, I'd think that Bonanza and the Andy Griffith Show are a couple of programs that parents and children could profitably watch together.