04/22/2026
Virginia City, Nevada — 1962.
At the height of Bonanza’s rise across the American frontier of television, a remarkable tribute was bestowed upon its legendary cast—one forged not in Hollywood, but from the very ore of the Comstock itself.
Inside the famed Bucket of Blood Saloon, proprietor Don McBride created for and presented each of the Cartwrights with a belt buckle unlike any other—crafted of genuine Comstock silver and crowned with a mounted $20 gold piece struck at the Carson City Mint.
These were no ordinary keepsakes.
They were symbols.
Silver from the veins that built Virginia City.
Gold from the mint that stamped Nevada into the nation’s coinage.
Together, forged into a tribute worthy of the West’s most beloved television family.
Among them, the buckle presented to Lorne Greene—the patriarch of the Ponderosa—stands as a piece of living history. Strong, enduring, and unmistakably Western, it reflected both the man and the legend he portrayed.
At a time when Bonanza brought the story of the Comstock to millions of homes—becoming the first Western broadcast in color—Virginia City answered in kind, offering the Cartwrights something far more enduring than applause:
A piece of the real West.
Today, that buckle remains more than an artifact.
It is a meeting point—where television myth and frontier truth stand side by side, forever bound in silver and gold.
