Because, Walter Knott, like the Wild West he loved, is the story of America. The story of a man and woman united in marriage, their simple faith in Jesus Christ, raising a family, building a business and creating a country like no other. Walter’s dream was simple – he wanted to be a farmer. When classmates were playing baseball or hunting varmints, Walter was cultivating vacant lots around his home in Pomona, California. In 1909 Walter leased twenty acres of promising farm land in the Coachella Valley. He planted, harvested, packed, sold and delivered directly to his independent grocer clients — by-passing the traditional brokers and distributors — keeping prices low and service high. At the end of the season, Walter went back to Pomona with $500 dollars tickling his pockets.
Walter convinced his high school sweetheart Cordelia Hornady that her life would be fuller as Cordelia Knott. The matrimonial “knott” was tied on Saturday, June 3, 1911, creating one of the most successful husband-wife teams in American business history. In 1914 Walter talked Cordelia into homesteading 160 acres of land in the Mojave Desert. He was excited. She wasn’t. With a well that never cooperated, Walter’s homestead failed. He was hired as a carpenter in a dead mining town. Calico, California held a special place in Walter’s heart. His paternal uncle, John Caleb King, was the primary investor in the Silver King Mine, one of the most successful silver mines in California history. Walter discovered that his employers were crooks, bamboozling city slickers. His conscience weighed heavier than his poverty and he quit.
In 1920 Walter and Cordelia moved to Buena Park, California to grow grapes on twenty acres of flat land. This was the birth of Knott’s Berry Farm. On June 13, 1934, after vowing she would never run a restaurant, Cordelia opened Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant. That first day she served eight dinners. Sales grew to over 425,000 dinners in 1940 and kept growing. Such growth created a problem, how to entertain waiting guests, standing in the hot sun for up to three hours. In 1940 Walter tapped into his passion for the Wild West, moving the Gold Trails Hotel in Prescott, Arizona, built in 1868, to Knott’s Berry Farm. The Gold Trails Hotel was the cornerstone of Walter’s contribution to the preservation and promotion of the Wild West – Ghost Town at Knott’s Berry Farm.
Walter wasn’t the only cowboy in this rodeo. There were others: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West wrote the script for future western movies; Herbert J. Yates, founder and president of Republic Pictures, popularized B Westerns and developed cowboy stars John Wayne, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and Walt Disney proved the power of television with his Davy Crockett series. Their stories, and others, are told in the book I am feverishly writing about the Wild West of Walter Knott.
