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Episode 1 on the disc was the one without bloodshed because ‘Bonanza’ liked to include comedic episodes as an occasional respite from ventilated bad guys. The other eight episodes had plenty of corpses, but I decided to count only the death-by-Cartwright bodies in them.

The important thing to remember was that every dead guy was righteously dead from a bullet (or knife wound in one case) fired (or inflicted) by one of the four Cartwrights. Apparently the only good Cartwright was a dead Cartwright in the eyes of a vast segment of people in frontier Nevada.

The final body count was 16 guys that died in a conflict with the Cartwrights. Hotheaded Little Joe led the way with six dead guys including an expired gypsy with a Little Joe shiv in him.

Not-so-kindly-and-lovable Hoss dispatched five misfits, while the cerebral Adam bagged four lowlifes and Pa only managed one kill.

TV westerns were always meant as an entertaining form of escapism where forces of good always prevailed over the forces of evil. But the actual physical and emotional results of a typical Cartwright firefight were never evident in the shows.

Exit wounds were never evident and extreme blood loss from a mortal bullet wound was also missing in action. Most of the bad guys were gut- shot, yet this incredibly painful gunshot wound always produced a quiet and rapid death.

There were no primal screams of agony lingering over a long and protracted period as the villains bled out on the screen. The largest display of pain was halting speech as a guy conveyed his last message before his final head turn.

Death was actually a pretty clean process for all involved in a Cartwright gun death. The dead bad guys required little or no blood and splattered tissue clean up after they expired from a gunshot wound, plus the Cartwright boys seemed genuinely unconcerned about their roles as grim reapers of the Comstock Lode.

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