Episode
Bonanza: El Toro Grande
Overview
Ben sends Hoss and Joe to Monterey to purchase an expensive seed bull. The first of Blocker and Landon's many comic misadventures, although the casual use of violence, as in the rapier fight, is oddly uncharacteristic for the series. Hoss reveals his real name to be Eric for the first time.
Details
- Series
- Bonanza
- Season
- Season 1
- Episode
- Episode 16
- Air date
- 1960-01-02
- Runtime
- 49 min
Episode context
El Toro Grande is Episode 16 in Season 1 of Bonanza. It aired on 1960-01-02. The runtime is 49 min.
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Episode 15: The Last Hunt
Hoss and Joe come across a pregnant Indian woman while hunting bighorn sheep and must deliver her baby. Despite touches of humor, including a scene in which Joe refers to a meal as "cattle fodder", the story does not have an altogether happy ending.
Episode 17: The Outcast
Because she is related to criminals, a young woman is ostracized by everyone but the the Cartwrights. She unwisely seeks solace with an ex-con friend of Joe's, Clay Renton, and it's up to Ben to straighten everything out. First episode to have a chapter title after the cast credits.
More episodes from this season
Episode 14: The Sisters
This episode begins with Adam defending the honor of Sue Ellen Terry in a duel. No one gets shot because the other man misses Adam and Adam generously shoots in the air to end the duel. Sue Ellen lives with her sister, who seems nice but turns out to be fairly evil, consumed with jealousy because she's getting older and her sister is a young beauty. When Adam drops Sue Ellen off after a date one night, half way through this episode, someone shoots her dead, and Adam becomes a suspect and is thrown in jail. When the sheriff suggests that Adam escape, he does it, but when he walks out, someone tries to shoot him. He chases after them but doesn't find them, and soon after hears Sue Ellen's sister scream. He runs up the stairs to find her dead, and of course, is then suspected of that murder as well. Of course, his family helps him during the last half hour, and it all turns out that someone we should not have suspected did all the murders, but that he actually wasn't trying to hit
Episode 18: A House Divided
As the Civil War approaches, Adam and Joe clash over which side to support. The situation is complicated by the arrival of Frederick Kyle, a Southern sympathizer. He was an old friend of Joe's mother and viewers also discover that Joe's middle name is Francis.
Episode 13: Vendetta
In a variation of "High Noon", Ben and Hoss must face a gang of outlaws practically all alone when most of Virginia City's citizens go into hiding. The most action-filled episode since "The Paiute War".
Episode 19: The Gunmen
In the first all-out comic episode of the series, Hoss and Joe travel to Kiowa Flats, Texas, where they are mistaken for the notorious Slade Brothers, also played by Blocker and Landon.
Episode 12: The Hanging Posse
Adam and Joe reluctantly join a group of vengeful townsmen, who are out to lynch the three men who supposedly killed Vannie Johnson. The posse is run by Paiute Scroggs and Flint Johnson, the dead woman's husband. When Adam and Joe clash with them, they both separate and try to reach the three men before the posse does. This episode's storyline is a variation of the 1943 film "The Ox-Bow Incident".
Episode 20: The Fear Merchants
The Cartwrights encounter racial bigotry in Virginia City and end up protecting a Chinese boy from mob violence. Victor Sen Yung, in his largest role to date, speaks normally in the presence of his fellow countrymen, but reverts to broken English when with the Cartwrights.
Episode 11: The Truckee Strip
Luther Bishop and Ben Cartwright have had an ongoing land dispute for a number of years, over a small tract called the Truckee Strip. One of Bishop's employee's has a grudge against the Cartwrights and wants to stir up the feud again, while also harboring designs on Bishop's pretty daughter, Amy.
Joe meets and falls in love with Amy, in spite of the family differences and the two want to marry. Just when it looks like the feud will end with the union of the two young people, Bishop's man attacks Amy and Joe must come to the rescue.
Episode 21: The Spanish Grant
In "The Spanish Grant", a young bargirl, Rosita Morales is pretending to be a Spanish noblewoman named Isabella Marie Inez de la Cuesta and at the end of the story, it's revealed she is really Rosita Morales, but on the other hand, is she really Rosita Morales? This little twist at the end is simply entertaining everytime it's viewed, with the viewer able to determine the young woman's real identity at the end of act four.
Episode 10: The Magnificent Adah
Virginia City is visited by actress Adah Issacs Menken, who happens to be an old acquaintance of Ben's. Joe is badly beaten by Adah's jealous suitor, John C. Regan, who is bested in a fight with an enraged Hoss.
Episode 22: Blood on the Land
A shiftless sheepherder, Jeb Drummond, encroaches his herd of sheep on the Ponderosa and refuses to budge. He resists all of Ben's attempts to throw him off his land and finally resorts to taking Adam prisoner in exchange for ownership of the ranch.