{character info | supplemental history}
Oct. 19th, 2012 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
man_in_blackBorn in 1830 in Boston, Massachusetts to Ben and Elizabeth (Stoddard) Cartwright, Adam never knew his mother and would return to his hometown many years later. Elizabeth died shortly after the baby was born, living just long enough to extract a promise from Ben that he would not abandon his dream to go west and make his home there, on his own land. Adam was only a few months old when Ben left Boston with a wagon-load of belongings and a wet-nurse. Little is known of those first few years of his life but there are some solid facts that cannot be ignored: they were tough years and Adam spent those formative years without much in the way of material possessions -- or even a home.
In 1835, Adam became sick as they passed through a town in Illinois. The nurse who had accompanied them was long gone. Ben, as he had been doing along the way, stopped in town to find a job. He would take no charity, but he would work. Meaning only to spend long enough in this town to nurse Adam back to health, he was caught up in drama at the local watering hole. Taking what money he had -- which wasn't much at all -- Ben went to the general store, where he discovered that the woman who ran it was the brother of the man he'd had an altercation with in the bar. Inger Borgstrom, though, held nothing against him, especially so after Adam wandered into the store complaining that he felt worse, not better. Inger was quite taken with the five-year-old child (and with his father, for that matter) and even when Ben was suspected of assaulting her brother, she cared for Adam. Adam, for his part, called her a "real nice lady." It wasn't long before Inger became his stepmother. The small family continued west.
A year later, they were traveling with a wagon train through western Nebraska. Adam was one of a handful of children. The wagon train's guide, a drunk with money on his mind rather than the safety of his charges, became involved in an altercation with a small band of Native Americans; the guide killed two of them. While Ben was dealing with this, Inger gave birth to a son, whom they named Erik -- and whom Adam called "Hoss," in honor of Inger's brother. (Gunnar had told Adam that "hoss" meant a big, friendly man and that he would be honored if, someday, someone called him such.) Only days after Ben and the guide returned to the train, the settlers were attacked by the remaining Native Americans. They took shelter at Ash Hollow, where a small station stood. Inger pushed Adam and Hoss into a corner of the building, where they'd be somewhat protected from flying bullets and arrows. Take care of your brother, she told Adam and then picked up a rifle one of the men who'd been killed had dropped.
When Inger turned to check on her boys, she was killed.
The devastated family continued west. Between 1836 and 1840, Ben established his ranch in what was then western Utah (later to become Nevada territory.) On the shores of Lake Tahoe, the Ponderosa quickly became a ranch to be proud of. It was an area that grew quickly, too: silver was struck near what would become Virginia City and the population boomed. The Ponderosa grew with it, through timber contracts and interests in silver mines in the area.
In 1840, Ben traveled to New Orleans after a trusted ranch hand, Jean de Marigny, was killed (and saved Ben's life in the process.) Wanting to take the news to the man's widow personally, he instead became embroiled in a bitter family dispute. Jean's widow, Marie de Marigny, became Ben's wife; she traveled back to the Ponderosa with him. "Little Joe" Cartwright was born in 1842. While canon doesn't show anything from this time period, there are several instances in which it's said that Adam didn't give Marie an easy time. What exactly he did is never explicitly stated, but it's inferred that it took at least a couple years before he was on comfortable terms with his second stepmother.
Just in time to watch her killed in a horse-riding accident.
After Marie was killed, Ben fell into a deep depression -- again, insinuated by canon but never expounded upon -- and Adam was left to raise two boys as well as run a growing ranch. It's not said how long this lasted, but it was long enough that Adam ran himself to exhaustion and his penchant for "parenting" his younger brothers was firmly entrenched into his personality.
In 1847, after Ben had come back and they settled into something comfortable, Adam left the Ponderosa to go "back east" for school. One assumes he went back to Boston, to attend Harvard Scientific School (and perhaps lived with family still in Boston. Again, it's hinted at but never explicitly stateed.) An educated engineer and an architect, he returned to the Ponderosa three years later and designed the ranch house. Although he and his father clashed fairly often -- new, untested ways vs. old, tried ways -- he settled into his role as the ranch foreman and his father's right hand man.
The series itself starts in the year 1859, when Adam is 29 years old and firmly in his place as the Ponderosa's foreman and one hell of a businessman. To outline every action in every episode leading up to his canon point would be superfluous -- though a linked guide to all those episodes Adam appears in is provided, if needed -- but there are several episodes that are pivotal to Adam's character. In light of this, the most pivotal moments in each season will be highlighted.
As the series starts, it is apparent that Adam and his youngest brother, Joe, often clash. Joe is only seventeen, twelve years younger than Adam, and coming into his own. With stirrings of a conflict back east, Adam's decided Northern sympathies clash mightily with Joe's Southern roots. It's this that causes most of the conflict throughout the first season (and then again in the fourth.) Early in the first season, Adam is (almost inadvertantly) involved in a massacre of the Paiute tribe that lives near the Ponderosa. Having gone out with a group and men and his father to try to work out their differences peacefully, Adam is taken hostage when one of the men opens fire on the Native Americans. He is held as a bargaining chip: either the white men leave them be or they kill Adam, who is an upstanding member of the community. Ben, Adam's father, does his best to keep the peace but ultimately fails. Adam manages to get free on his own, tries to find the man who stirred everything up to cover a murder, but is too late. Beaten and bruised, in more ways than one, he rides off with his father while Chief Winnemucca mourns the death of his oldest son. Later during the same year, Joe and Adam set aside their differences to keep a posse from hanging a man suspected of murder before a trial. Ultimately successful, it helps to cement their relationship, though it's not long before the looming war in the east tears them apart again.
When a southern sympathize who knew Joe's mother comes into town, he uses Joe to make contacts with the silver mine owners in Virginia City. Adam is less than pleased to know that those funds might be funneled to the Southern war machine. He and Joe fight bitterly and he makes the decision to leave the Ponderosa; he and Joe obviously cannot live under the same roof and Joe's younger. Joe needs the family more than Adam does. In the end, Joe cannot, in good conscious, help a man who doesn't care who might be hurt in the process of attaining his goals and sets off to bring Adam home. After this, their relationship settles into something less acrimonious.
Several months pass and, while Adam is involved with many things, the next moment that is pivotal to his character is in the finale of season one. His brothers respond to a call for help in the general store in town only to find that a man, Farmer Perkins, has shot the store owner. Farmer was acting on behalf of Sam Bryant, who was running an extortion racket: businesses would pay money for "protection" or face the consequences. Farmer Perkins was brought up on trial and Adam, his father, and his brothers were deputized to help protect witnesses and keep Bryant's men from breaking Farmer out of jail. The night before Farmer is to hang, Ben is kidnapped. A note is thrown into the sheriff's office, attached to a rock, and the sheriff and the Cartwright brothers are faced with an agonizing choice: free Farmer Perkins or Ben Cartwright will hang. Their first impulse is to try to find where Ben is being held; that goes spectacularly wrong and the sheriff is shot. Adam is now acting sheriff and he makes his position clear: any murderer in Virginia City will face justice. He'll hang Farmer Perkins as scheduled and if Bryant kills his father, Bryant will be next.
Adam faces opposition from the other witnesses to the first murder and his brothers, though they ultimately stand with him. After a tense night -- in which Adam walks into the bar full of Bryant's men and tells them exactly what will happen to Bryant if Ben hangs and nearly gets beaten to a pulp right there -- Farmer hangs... and Bryant shows himself a coward. He frees Ben, then is shot by his own man, who accuses him of cowardice. Adam's very risky stand worked.
In the second season, there are two episodes that stand out. (Keep in mind, though, that Adam does play major and minor parts in most of the other episodes during that season. In an effort to keep this already too long section from becoming too much of a behemoth, I don't want to outline everything he does.) In the first episode, Adam is injured after he takes an arrow in the leg and then falls from an outcropping. Saved and nursed by a woman living in the mountains, he falls deeply in love with her. It's speculated that Ruth -- or at least the romance with Ruth -- could be a fever-induced dream, since Adam was hurt so badly and then so sick through much of the episode. It's hinted at, but left for the viewer to decide. For my own part, I tend to think Ruth existed and did dress his wounds, but the romance was almost entirely a fevered hallucination. As to why I believe this, the scenes where Adam and Ruth are happy together, Adam is unfettered by fever and pain. In scenes where there is little to no mention of any sort of romance, Adam is sick and unable to move. Whether she's real or not, the very fact that Adam is questioned over the truth of her existence does shake him. She's nowhere to be found -- having seemingly left with the Shoshone to save him -- by the time Ben catches up with him and Adam never goes after her.
The second episode in that season that contains defining moments for Adam deals with his best friend. It's stated that Adam and Ross Marquette grew up together and that Adam introduced Ross to Delphine, who would later marry Ross. They remained good friends throughout the years and Adam even helped Ross set up his own ranch. During the course of the episode, Adam learns that Ross has hit Delphine, beating a "confession" from her that she slept with Adam. It was untrue, but Delphine was so frightened that Ross would keep beating her that she told him what she thought he wanted to hear. When Adam finds out, he takes Delphine from her home and puts her up at the house on the Ponderosa, with the promise that he'd talk to Ross and try to figure out what was happening. In the course of the conversation, he tells Delphine that, whatever she decides, he'll help her, whether it be money to travel elsewhere or finding out what was going through Ross' head. She asks him not to give up on Ross and, though he's obviously upset, he promises not to antagonize Ross -- though he does promise to keep Ross away from Delphine.
After speaking with Ross, it's evident that something is very wrong with him. Ross' moods fluctuate wildly, drawing a gun on Adam in one moment and tripping over himself with uncertainty in the next. While Adam extracts a promise from Ross that he'll not pursue Delphine and then goes to speak with the town doctor, sheriff, and preacher about Ross, Ross himself is planning to rob a stage. Ross' ranch has effectively become a base of operations for a gang of thieves. Ben discovers that several hundred head of Ponderosa cattle are gone, presumably rustled and comes to a startling realization: Ross has changed the name and brand of his ranch, so that he can take Ponderosa cattle and easily rebrand them as his Silver Dollar cattle. When Ben and Joe go to confront him with the sheriff, they discover the outlaws and Ross' role in the stage robbery. One of the thieves tells Ben that Ross has gone to retrieve his wife; Ben tells Adam, who races back to the ranchhouse at the Ponderosa.
He finds the door standing wide open and Delphine lying near death on the floor of the great room. She dies in his arms, repeatedly asking him why? Angry and grief-stricken, Adam takes one of the hunting rifles from the rack and goes after Ross. (Presumably, given Adam's character, it's to bring him in to the sheriff, to let the sheriff and doctor decide what to do with him.) When Adam tries to speak to Ross, Ross claimed not to know him and shot him. The bullet grazes his arm, but Adam still didn't return fire; he did, however, try to get closer to Ross. Adam is shot again, this time in the shoulder, and when Ross tries to make a killing shot, Adam returned fire. He stays at Ross' side until he dies and, at the end, Ross comes back to himself, honestly unaware of what he'd been doing for the last tenth months.
It is a significant event for Adam, not only because he loses his best friend (and at his own hand) but because it -- along with the time with Ruth -- highlights what will become an ongoing struggle for him. Adam has several brushes with madness and hallucination, especially through the second and third season. Ross serves as a counterpoint to Adam as well as a warning to what he could become. (Later in the second season, Adam falls ill again and his fever is high enough to bring hallucinations; it's an ongoing, if subtle, theme in second/third seasons.)
In the third season, there are several Adam-centric episodes: he is nearly killed twice in a fairly short period of time and there are several instances where his particular (and sometimes peculiar) obstinant nature is highlighted. Rather than detail every one of these instances -- it would take forever, because Adam really is that stubborn -- I'd like to point out some of the consequences of his actions. He was gravely wounded, lost friends, severed business ties, accidentally got engaged (sorta) while trying to help another man get the girl, fought with Joe once or twice, helped a family come back together, and was pistol-whipped in the head and nearly killed and most of it stems from his tendency to keep digging when logic would say otherwise.
And all of this is before he's robbed of his money, weapons, and horse and left in the desert to die. Because "The Crucible" is such a central episode to Adam's character and because it falls in line with the theme of madness that Adam often skirts around, I feel particular attention needs to be paid to the events portrayed in it. After a cattle drive, Adam and Joe stop in Eastgate; because of a careless conversation, would-be thieves learn that Adam is carrying five thousand dollars and that he is planning to leave town alone, to go camping and hunting while Joe stays in town and relaxes there. They plan to meet in three days' time at Signal Rock. Joe plans to take in the trial of Obadiah Johnson while in town; Adam calls it a waste of time. Johnson confessed to killing two people and, so, Johnson will hang. It's that simple. Adam tells Joe that it's only logic and that a person must face the consequences of their actions. If they lose control, then they face punishment. It's civilized.
Those words will come back to haunt him.
The men who overheard the conversation about the money hold up Adam out in the middle of nowhere, some two days out of Eastgate. They leave him stranded in the desert. On foot and without provisions, Adam starts for the nearest town with little to no hope of actually making it before the desert kills him. He's exhausted, dehydrated, and not in the best state when he stumbles across a prospector's camp. Peter Kane seems a fine man at first: educated and erudite and, most importantly, willing to share some water and food. Kane tells Adam that he would be glad to let Adam borrow his mule and some provisions to get to town, but that he's too close to a gold strike to walk away now. He makes a deal with Adam: help him work for three days -- all the time he needs to get the gold out, he says -- and Kane will travel with him to Signal Rock. Without much choice, Adam agrees.
From that point on, things just go downhill. Kane, at first, needles Adam with only words; it's readily apparent that he's jealous of Adam's wealth and place in society. They debate the merit of hard work and the veneer of "civilization" that every man wears. Kane makes the point that any man can be pushed to murder; Adam stands fast in his own conviction. Kane continually asks Adam if he thinks that he is a better man, because of his station in life and because of his convictions. Kane eventually pushes Adam to work harder and harder, to the point where Kane will not go into the mine. He sits outside and sorts what Adam brings out of the mine. By the end of day three, Adam is fed up and attempts to steal the mule and some water to get away. Kane retaliates by shooting the mule.
Now stuck with Kane, Adam has little choice but to go along with his games. (Remember, Adam is unarmed, Kane is not. Adam also started out at a disadvantage; after his wandering in the desert and working for Kane, he hasn't recovered his strength.) Adam, in essence, takes the place of Kane's mule, while Kane cuts Adam's rations of water and food in half. Then he halves it again, then keeps all food and water from Adam. All the while, he continues to make Adam work. (Adam's quality of work goes downhill fast, really. It's amazing how long he lasted.) After Adam tries to escape one night, Kane ties him hand and foot to a post while he's not working. Unless Adam is in the mine -- which is hot and choked with dust -- Kane won't let him sit or stand in the shade. At one point, they hear Ben calling for Adam, but Adam is too exhausted to answer. (When Adam failed to meet Joe at Signal Rock, Joe mounted a search for his brother and eventually discovered that he'd been robbed in the desert. He contacted the rest of the family and they began searching for some sign of him.)
By this point, Adam has been worn down to almost nothing. He's so exhausted he can barely stand, much less walk straight. He's barely speaking and, in truth, he's little more than a broken down pack animal. It's not enough for Kane. To prove that himself right -- that any man can be driven to murder, even a man with convictions like Adam's -- Kane sets up one more game. After confessing to Adam that he knew there was never any gold in the mine, he produces a sack of food, a canteen of water, and a rifle. He sets the food, water, and rifle down on the ground and backs away. He tells Adam that they will fight to the death over the provisions. On the count of five, they'll both go for the rifle.
Adam doesn't make it past "two." He bypasses the rifle entirely and goes for Kane's throat. He nearly kills his tormentor, but regains control. (Barely.) When he grabs the food and water and begins to stumble out of camp, Kane begins to laugh: he thinks he's won, because Adam will walk away and leave him there to die, just like the thieves left Adam. The words stop Adam in his tracks and he ends up making a travois to haul Kane out of the desert with him. Tied to the travois and helpless, Kane dies. (Whether of exposure or a lingering effect of the near-choking to death or what exactly, it's hard to say.) Even dead, Kane still somehow made Adam into nothing more than a beast of burden.
That's how his father and brothers found him: dragging a travois with a dead body on it. By this time, Adam was weak and delusional. At first, he didn't acknowledge the presence of his family. When he does, he doesn't seem to recognize them at all. He's muttering and laughing under his breath: "There was no gold. No more gold. No more games." It's only after Ben demands his attention that Adam collapses, sobbing. It should be noted that there is nothing close to this sort of emotional upheaval in any of Adam's other appearances in the series, though the deaths of Delphine and Ross do begin to approach it. While the theme of skirting with madness is left aside after "The Crucible," for the most part, it does change Adam's character and understanding what happens in the episode is pivotal to understanding the character.
The rest of Adam's appearances, save for a few episodes here and there, are hardly life-defining. In the fourth season, he accidentally shot his brother Joe while on a hunting trip and afterwards briefly entertained the thought of leaving the Ponderosa. In his disgust with himself, he lashed out at the way of life in the West in general. In the fifth season, he met Laura Dayton and was engaged. Instead of spending time with her, though, he wanted to build a house and establish his wealth as a surprise to her and they drifted apart. When he badly injured his back in a fall, Laura fell in with his cousin, Will. Rather than have Laura marry him out of pity, Adam broke off the engagement and encouraged her to leave with Will.
His canon point comes late in the sixth season, just before he left the Ponderosa. Adam has been asked to substitute teach at the Virginia City school after the regular teacher is injured. (Doing something he encouraged her to do, in point of fact. It's kind of an obligation for him to step in to teach.) While teaching a history course, he stumbles over some information that is highly damaging to upstanding members of the community and territory. One evening in the schoolhouse, three men assault him and leave him beaten on the porch of the school. This is when he is pulled into the game.
In 1835, Adam became sick as they passed through a town in Illinois. The nurse who had accompanied them was long gone. Ben, as he had been doing along the way, stopped in town to find a job. He would take no charity, but he would work. Meaning only to spend long enough in this town to nurse Adam back to health, he was caught up in drama at the local watering hole. Taking what money he had -- which wasn't much at all -- Ben went to the general store, where he discovered that the woman who ran it was the brother of the man he'd had an altercation with in the bar. Inger Borgstrom, though, held nothing against him, especially so after Adam wandered into the store complaining that he felt worse, not better. Inger was quite taken with the five-year-old child (and with his father, for that matter) and even when Ben was suspected of assaulting her brother, she cared for Adam. Adam, for his part, called her a "real nice lady." It wasn't long before Inger became his stepmother. The small family continued west.
A year later, they were traveling with a wagon train through western Nebraska. Adam was one of a handful of children. The wagon train's guide, a drunk with money on his mind rather than the safety of his charges, became involved in an altercation with a small band of Native Americans; the guide killed two of them. While Ben was dealing with this, Inger gave birth to a son, whom they named Erik -- and whom Adam called "Hoss," in honor of Inger's brother. (Gunnar had told Adam that "hoss" meant a big, friendly man and that he would be honored if, someday, someone called him such.) Only days after Ben and the guide returned to the train, the settlers were attacked by the remaining Native Americans. They took shelter at Ash Hollow, where a small station stood. Inger pushed Adam and Hoss into a corner of the building, where they'd be somewhat protected from flying bullets and arrows. Take care of your brother, she told Adam and then picked up a rifle one of the men who'd been killed had dropped.
When Inger turned to check on her boys, she was killed.
The devastated family continued west. Between 1836 and 1840, Ben established his ranch in what was then western Utah (later to become Nevada territory.) On the shores of Lake Tahoe, the Ponderosa quickly became a ranch to be proud of. It was an area that grew quickly, too: silver was struck near what would become Virginia City and the population boomed. The Ponderosa grew with it, through timber contracts and interests in silver mines in the area.
In 1840, Ben traveled to New Orleans after a trusted ranch hand, Jean de Marigny, was killed (and saved Ben's life in the process.) Wanting to take the news to the man's widow personally, he instead became embroiled in a bitter family dispute. Jean's widow, Marie de Marigny, became Ben's wife; she traveled back to the Ponderosa with him. "Little Joe" Cartwright was born in 1842. While canon doesn't show anything from this time period, there are several instances in which it's said that Adam didn't give Marie an easy time. What exactly he did is never explicitly stated, but it's inferred that it took at least a couple years before he was on comfortable terms with his second stepmother.
Just in time to watch her killed in a horse-riding accident.
After Marie was killed, Ben fell into a deep depression -- again, insinuated by canon but never expounded upon -- and Adam was left to raise two boys as well as run a growing ranch. It's not said how long this lasted, but it was long enough that Adam ran himself to exhaustion and his penchant for "parenting" his younger brothers was firmly entrenched into his personality.
In 1847, after Ben had come back and they settled into something comfortable, Adam left the Ponderosa to go "back east" for school. One assumes he went back to Boston, to attend Harvard Scientific School (and perhaps lived with family still in Boston. Again, it's hinted at but never explicitly stateed.) An educated engineer and an architect, he returned to the Ponderosa three years later and designed the ranch house. Although he and his father clashed fairly often -- new, untested ways vs. old, tried ways -- he settled into his role as the ranch foreman and his father's right hand man.
The series itself starts in the year 1859, when Adam is 29 years old and firmly in his place as the Ponderosa's foreman and one hell of a businessman. To outline every action in every episode leading up to his canon point would be superfluous -- though a linked guide to all those episodes Adam appears in is provided, if needed -- but there are several episodes that are pivotal to Adam's character. In light of this, the most pivotal moments in each season will be highlighted.
As the series starts, it is apparent that Adam and his youngest brother, Joe, often clash. Joe is only seventeen, twelve years younger than Adam, and coming into his own. With stirrings of a conflict back east, Adam's decided Northern sympathies clash mightily with Joe's Southern roots. It's this that causes most of the conflict throughout the first season (and then again in the fourth.) Early in the first season, Adam is (almost inadvertantly) involved in a massacre of the Paiute tribe that lives near the Ponderosa. Having gone out with a group and men and his father to try to work out their differences peacefully, Adam is taken hostage when one of the men opens fire on the Native Americans. He is held as a bargaining chip: either the white men leave them be or they kill Adam, who is an upstanding member of the community. Ben, Adam's father, does his best to keep the peace but ultimately fails. Adam manages to get free on his own, tries to find the man who stirred everything up to cover a murder, but is too late. Beaten and bruised, in more ways than one, he rides off with his father while Chief Winnemucca mourns the death of his oldest son. Later during the same year, Joe and Adam set aside their differences to keep a posse from hanging a man suspected of murder before a trial. Ultimately successful, it helps to cement their relationship, though it's not long before the looming war in the east tears them apart again.
When a southern sympathize who knew Joe's mother comes into town, he uses Joe to make contacts with the silver mine owners in Virginia City. Adam is less than pleased to know that those funds might be funneled to the Southern war machine. He and Joe fight bitterly and he makes the decision to leave the Ponderosa; he and Joe obviously cannot live under the same roof and Joe's younger. Joe needs the family more than Adam does. In the end, Joe cannot, in good conscious, help a man who doesn't care who might be hurt in the process of attaining his goals and sets off to bring Adam home. After this, their relationship settles into something less acrimonious.
Several months pass and, while Adam is involved with many things, the next moment that is pivotal to his character is in the finale of season one. His brothers respond to a call for help in the general store in town only to find that a man, Farmer Perkins, has shot the store owner. Farmer was acting on behalf of Sam Bryant, who was running an extortion racket: businesses would pay money for "protection" or face the consequences. Farmer Perkins was brought up on trial and Adam, his father, and his brothers were deputized to help protect witnesses and keep Bryant's men from breaking Farmer out of jail. The night before Farmer is to hang, Ben is kidnapped. A note is thrown into the sheriff's office, attached to a rock, and the sheriff and the Cartwright brothers are faced with an agonizing choice: free Farmer Perkins or Ben Cartwright will hang. Their first impulse is to try to find where Ben is being held; that goes spectacularly wrong and the sheriff is shot. Adam is now acting sheriff and he makes his position clear: any murderer in Virginia City will face justice. He'll hang Farmer Perkins as scheduled and if Bryant kills his father, Bryant will be next.
Adam faces opposition from the other witnesses to the first murder and his brothers, though they ultimately stand with him. After a tense night -- in which Adam walks into the bar full of Bryant's men and tells them exactly what will happen to Bryant if Ben hangs and nearly gets beaten to a pulp right there -- Farmer hangs... and Bryant shows himself a coward. He frees Ben, then is shot by his own man, who accuses him of cowardice. Adam's very risky stand worked.
In the second season, there are two episodes that stand out. (Keep in mind, though, that Adam does play major and minor parts in most of the other episodes during that season. In an effort to keep this already too long section from becoming too much of a behemoth, I don't want to outline everything he does.) In the first episode, Adam is injured after he takes an arrow in the leg and then falls from an outcropping. Saved and nursed by a woman living in the mountains, he falls deeply in love with her. It's speculated that Ruth -- or at least the romance with Ruth -- could be a fever-induced dream, since Adam was hurt so badly and then so sick through much of the episode. It's hinted at, but left for the viewer to decide. For my own part, I tend to think Ruth existed and did dress his wounds, but the romance was almost entirely a fevered hallucination. As to why I believe this, the scenes where Adam and Ruth are happy together, Adam is unfettered by fever and pain. In scenes where there is little to no mention of any sort of romance, Adam is sick and unable to move. Whether she's real or not, the very fact that Adam is questioned over the truth of her existence does shake him. She's nowhere to be found -- having seemingly left with the Shoshone to save him -- by the time Ben catches up with him and Adam never goes after her.
The second episode in that season that contains defining moments for Adam deals with his best friend. It's stated that Adam and Ross Marquette grew up together and that Adam introduced Ross to Delphine, who would later marry Ross. They remained good friends throughout the years and Adam even helped Ross set up his own ranch. During the course of the episode, Adam learns that Ross has hit Delphine, beating a "confession" from her that she slept with Adam. It was untrue, but Delphine was so frightened that Ross would keep beating her that she told him what she thought he wanted to hear. When Adam finds out, he takes Delphine from her home and puts her up at the house on the Ponderosa, with the promise that he'd talk to Ross and try to figure out what was happening. In the course of the conversation, he tells Delphine that, whatever she decides, he'll help her, whether it be money to travel elsewhere or finding out what was going through Ross' head. She asks him not to give up on Ross and, though he's obviously upset, he promises not to antagonize Ross -- though he does promise to keep Ross away from Delphine.
After speaking with Ross, it's evident that something is very wrong with him. Ross' moods fluctuate wildly, drawing a gun on Adam in one moment and tripping over himself with uncertainty in the next. While Adam extracts a promise from Ross that he'll not pursue Delphine and then goes to speak with the town doctor, sheriff, and preacher about Ross, Ross himself is planning to rob a stage. Ross' ranch has effectively become a base of operations for a gang of thieves. Ben discovers that several hundred head of Ponderosa cattle are gone, presumably rustled and comes to a startling realization: Ross has changed the name and brand of his ranch, so that he can take Ponderosa cattle and easily rebrand them as his Silver Dollar cattle. When Ben and Joe go to confront him with the sheriff, they discover the outlaws and Ross' role in the stage robbery. One of the thieves tells Ben that Ross has gone to retrieve his wife; Ben tells Adam, who races back to the ranchhouse at the Ponderosa.
He finds the door standing wide open and Delphine lying near death on the floor of the great room. She dies in his arms, repeatedly asking him why? Angry and grief-stricken, Adam takes one of the hunting rifles from the rack and goes after Ross. (Presumably, given Adam's character, it's to bring him in to the sheriff, to let the sheriff and doctor decide what to do with him.) When Adam tries to speak to Ross, Ross claimed not to know him and shot him. The bullet grazes his arm, but Adam still didn't return fire; he did, however, try to get closer to Ross. Adam is shot again, this time in the shoulder, and when Ross tries to make a killing shot, Adam returned fire. He stays at Ross' side until he dies and, at the end, Ross comes back to himself, honestly unaware of what he'd been doing for the last tenth months.
It is a significant event for Adam, not only because he loses his best friend (and at his own hand) but because it -- along with the time with Ruth -- highlights what will become an ongoing struggle for him. Adam has several brushes with madness and hallucination, especially through the second and third season. Ross serves as a counterpoint to Adam as well as a warning to what he could become. (Later in the second season, Adam falls ill again and his fever is high enough to bring hallucinations; it's an ongoing, if subtle, theme in second/third seasons.)
In the third season, there are several Adam-centric episodes: he is nearly killed twice in a fairly short period of time and there are several instances where his particular (and sometimes peculiar) obstinant nature is highlighted. Rather than detail every one of these instances -- it would take forever, because Adam really is that stubborn -- I'd like to point out some of the consequences of his actions. He was gravely wounded, lost friends, severed business ties, accidentally got engaged (sorta) while trying to help another man get the girl, fought with Joe once or twice, helped a family come back together, and was pistol-whipped in the head and nearly killed and most of it stems from his tendency to keep digging when logic would say otherwise.
And all of this is before he's robbed of his money, weapons, and horse and left in the desert to die. Because "The Crucible" is such a central episode to Adam's character and because it falls in line with the theme of madness that Adam often skirts around, I feel particular attention needs to be paid to the events portrayed in it. After a cattle drive, Adam and Joe stop in Eastgate; because of a careless conversation, would-be thieves learn that Adam is carrying five thousand dollars and that he is planning to leave town alone, to go camping and hunting while Joe stays in town and relaxes there. They plan to meet in three days' time at Signal Rock. Joe plans to take in the trial of Obadiah Johnson while in town; Adam calls it a waste of time. Johnson confessed to killing two people and, so, Johnson will hang. It's that simple. Adam tells Joe that it's only logic and that a person must face the consequences of their actions. If they lose control, then they face punishment. It's civilized.
Those words will come back to haunt him.
The men who overheard the conversation about the money hold up Adam out in the middle of nowhere, some two days out of Eastgate. They leave him stranded in the desert. On foot and without provisions, Adam starts for the nearest town with little to no hope of actually making it before the desert kills him. He's exhausted, dehydrated, and not in the best state when he stumbles across a prospector's camp. Peter Kane seems a fine man at first: educated and erudite and, most importantly, willing to share some water and food. Kane tells Adam that he would be glad to let Adam borrow his mule and some provisions to get to town, but that he's too close to a gold strike to walk away now. He makes a deal with Adam: help him work for three days -- all the time he needs to get the gold out, he says -- and Kane will travel with him to Signal Rock. Without much choice, Adam agrees.
From that point on, things just go downhill. Kane, at first, needles Adam with only words; it's readily apparent that he's jealous of Adam's wealth and place in society. They debate the merit of hard work and the veneer of "civilization" that every man wears. Kane makes the point that any man can be pushed to murder; Adam stands fast in his own conviction. Kane continually asks Adam if he thinks that he is a better man, because of his station in life and because of his convictions. Kane eventually pushes Adam to work harder and harder, to the point where Kane will not go into the mine. He sits outside and sorts what Adam brings out of the mine. By the end of day three, Adam is fed up and attempts to steal the mule and some water to get away. Kane retaliates by shooting the mule.
Now stuck with Kane, Adam has little choice but to go along with his games. (Remember, Adam is unarmed, Kane is not. Adam also started out at a disadvantage; after his wandering in the desert and working for Kane, he hasn't recovered his strength.) Adam, in essence, takes the place of Kane's mule, while Kane cuts Adam's rations of water and food in half. Then he halves it again, then keeps all food and water from Adam. All the while, he continues to make Adam work. (Adam's quality of work goes downhill fast, really. It's amazing how long he lasted.) After Adam tries to escape one night, Kane ties him hand and foot to a post while he's not working. Unless Adam is in the mine -- which is hot and choked with dust -- Kane won't let him sit or stand in the shade. At one point, they hear Ben calling for Adam, but Adam is too exhausted to answer. (When Adam failed to meet Joe at Signal Rock, Joe mounted a search for his brother and eventually discovered that he'd been robbed in the desert. He contacted the rest of the family and they began searching for some sign of him.)
By this point, Adam has been worn down to almost nothing. He's so exhausted he can barely stand, much less walk straight. He's barely speaking and, in truth, he's little more than a broken down pack animal. It's not enough for Kane. To prove that himself right -- that any man can be driven to murder, even a man with convictions like Adam's -- Kane sets up one more game. After confessing to Adam that he knew there was never any gold in the mine, he produces a sack of food, a canteen of water, and a rifle. He sets the food, water, and rifle down on the ground and backs away. He tells Adam that they will fight to the death over the provisions. On the count of five, they'll both go for the rifle.
Adam doesn't make it past "two." He bypasses the rifle entirely and goes for Kane's throat. He nearly kills his tormentor, but regains control. (Barely.) When he grabs the food and water and begins to stumble out of camp, Kane begins to laugh: he thinks he's won, because Adam will walk away and leave him there to die, just like the thieves left Adam. The words stop Adam in his tracks and he ends up making a travois to haul Kane out of the desert with him. Tied to the travois and helpless, Kane dies. (Whether of exposure or a lingering effect of the near-choking to death or what exactly, it's hard to say.) Even dead, Kane still somehow made Adam into nothing more than a beast of burden.
That's how his father and brothers found him: dragging a travois with a dead body on it. By this time, Adam was weak and delusional. At first, he didn't acknowledge the presence of his family. When he does, he doesn't seem to recognize them at all. He's muttering and laughing under his breath: "There was no gold. No more gold. No more games." It's only after Ben demands his attention that Adam collapses, sobbing. It should be noted that there is nothing close to this sort of emotional upheaval in any of Adam's other appearances in the series, though the deaths of Delphine and Ross do begin to approach it. While the theme of skirting with madness is left aside after "The Crucible," for the most part, it does change Adam's character and understanding what happens in the episode is pivotal to understanding the character.
The rest of Adam's appearances, save for a few episodes here and there, are hardly life-defining. In the fourth season, he accidentally shot his brother Joe while on a hunting trip and afterwards briefly entertained the thought of leaving the Ponderosa. In his disgust with himself, he lashed out at the way of life in the West in general. In the fifth season, he met Laura Dayton and was engaged. Instead of spending time with her, though, he wanted to build a house and establish his wealth as a surprise to her and they drifted apart. When he badly injured his back in a fall, Laura fell in with his cousin, Will. Rather than have Laura marry him out of pity, Adam broke off the engagement and encouraged her to leave with Will.
His canon point comes late in the sixth season, just before he left the Ponderosa. Adam has been asked to substitute teach at the Virginia City school after the regular teacher is injured. (Doing something he encouraged her to do, in point of fact. It's kind of an obligation for him to step in to teach.) While teaching a history course, he stumbles over some information that is highly damaging to upstanding members of the community and territory. One evening in the schoolhouse, three men assault him and leave him beaten on the porch of the school. This is when he is pulled into the game.
