Bonanza Fan Fiction by “Southplains”

Marie’s background.  The part of the Cartwright saga that has always been hidden in swirling mists of obscurity, of dropped hints and half-told secrets.  Bonanza writers told us just enough to give us a sense of lost innocence and veiled shame, and perhaps not even that—or perhaps more than that, depending on which clues you choose to follow.

Like most Bonanza fans, I’ve always been curious about Joe’s mother’s history, and on this day, the day Michael Landon (and therefore Little Joe) was born, it seems appropriate to think about the woman who gave Little Joe life.  The one episode that dwelled solely on telling her story, or part of it, was sadly lacking—a convoluted mess of an episode, really.  After the tantalizing hints that were dropped in episodes like ‘The Stranger’, ‘The Julia Bulette Story’ and ‘First Born’, the ‘Marie, My Love’ story was not only confusing, but very disappointing.  We had so many questions that were not answered, and the episode hinged on such a short period in her life that we weren’t even given a chance to see what sort of woman she really was.

In the year that I’ve been writing Bonanza stories, I’ve thought long and hard about doing one about the mysteries surrounding Marie.  I’ve even started two or three over the past several months, but each time I attempted it, I quickly grew frustrated.  Marie’s story, you see, is so complicated that it’s hard to jam it all into one story.  It would take something novel-length to do it justice.

Well, a novel-length Bonanza story just isn’t something I want to do at the moment.  Or rather, it’s not something I feel I can do at the moment, not if I want to keep Real Life functioning smoothly.  So I decided to put out just a small story that touches upon some of Marie’s secrets, with the intent that I may add more in a series if the mood strikes me.

The result is a story called ‘Lucky’, and it flowed very quickly, as most of my favorite stories do.  (It is already posted elsewhere on the internet, and will soon be posted at Bonanzabrand as well.)  In ‘Lucky’, I fed Little Joe tiny pieces of his mother’s mysteries, and in the end—well, I pretty much left him—and us—with more questions than answers.

And it occurred to me—do I really want Joe to learn all there is to know about his mother?  I don’t think so.  I don’t think I want to know all her secrets, for that matter.  Peel away the mystery, and you lose something else as well.  As long as Marie remains a relative unknown to us, she can be anything we want her to be.  An innocent wronged, a woman with an “undesirable” heritage, or a worldly beauty who has used her charms in ways a “decent” woman shouldn’t.  This is one reason we see so many more stories about her than about Inger and Elizabeth.  Neither of Ben’s other wives have been tainted by that breath of scandal—therefore they are not minutely as interesting.  Loveable, kind, gentle, yes—but not interesting. 

The wonderful thing about Marie is that, with the lack of concrete evidence available among all the insinuations, we’ve all been given a remarkable freedom for creating our own versions of her.  Everyone’s opinion is equally viable.

And this is why writer after writer will continue to tantalize us with visions of Marie’s murky past.