Little Girl Lost

Wells Fargo delivers little Linda Sue Risk to the Cartwright door at the Ponderosa. She's a little girl that looks like a boy and guess what. She's a long lost Cartwright relative who was deposited at the Ponderosa by her mother Antoinette Bower who has been reduced to dire circumstances and can't care for. So she goes to the rich relatives.

Lorne Greene and his sons never turned away anyone in need. But they certainly aren't used to having a little girl around. She takes some getting used to. Poor Hop Sing is driven to distraction and Victor Sen Yung's scenes with little Ms. Risk are the best in the episode.

Pretty soon Bower joins them and so does George Mitchell playing her father-in-law with whom she's estranged. But it all kind of works out in the end and there's a mysterious Indian who hovers over the young girl like a guardian angel.

Women don't do well on the Ponderosa so I'm glad this all worked out. Watch the episode to see how.

Wells Fargo delivers a little girl to the Ponderosa. Samantha goes by Sam, and she's a hand full. And it's not just old fashioned discipline and new clothes she needs. The unwanted kid is a common Western theme. It works well with the performance of Victor Sen. It's the best part he got in the series. The Cartwrights and Candy all have good screen time here. I wasn't sure about the grandfather at first. He seems more like an out of control school master or orphanage director. When Samantha was trying to be a boy, it took a while to think of what boy she reminded me of. I realized she reminded me of Johnny Brady on Dennis The Menace. Fortunately Samantha gets broken.

The plot is pretty simple, a cantankerous old grandpa who pushed his son away, has a court order to take his granddaughter away from her mother, whom he only views as a "saloon girl" even though she helped his son and eventually married him. When they return to grandpa's ranch he refuses them and the son disappears on a drinking binge. So the mother, who is a distant cousin of Ben, sends the daughter to the Ponderosa. She turns the male ranch upside down, especially messing with Hop Sing. But, the men enjoy her presence.

The resolution between grandpa and his daughter-in-law is helped by her nursing him and then by the little girl, but it was a little too easy in the moment. I would have expected some more challenges, but maybe out of time. At least in the ending scene the grandpa is trying to change.

I did like to see more of Hop Sing, which only happens in a few Bonanza episodes. And here, Hop Sing also plays the wise peacemaker, something usually reserved for Ben.

The Indian, "See More", shows up in the last scene and it is always nice to see the Cartwrights treat Native Americans, just the same as they treat everyone.