Eulogy for a Gambler, the funeral oration for Riley Grannan, by Herman W. Knickerbocker
EULOGY FOR A
GAMBLER
The funeral oration for Riley Grannan
by Herman W. Knickerbocker
Rawhide, NevadaApril, 1908
On April 3, 1908, a former Methodist minister faced a small audience crowded into a backroom dance hall in the booming mining town of Rawhide.
His name was Herman Knickerbocker, and he had been the pastor of Trinity Church in Los Angeles until he was tried for heresy for his unconventional religious views. Acquitted, he nevertheless abandoned his church career and joined the rush to the gold and silver camps then booming in the southern Nevada desert.
This preacher-turned-prospector tried his hand at numerous jobs during his Nevada years, from pick and shovel mining to theatricals and Shakespearean readings. By 1908 he had followed the tide of fortune to Rawhide, as had thousands of others, including an eastern gambler and sporting man named Riley Grannan.
Grannan was famous throughout the country for the size of his bets and the strength of his nerve. In the winter of 1908 he was tapped out broke in San Francisco. Bankrolled by some friends, he went to Goldfield and then to Rawhide, where he bought a saloon and gambling house called Moss’s Corner.
He died in April of pneumonia, and before his corpse was loaded into the back of an open Pope-Toledo for the long drive to the Railroad at Schurz, the coffin was carried into the back of the saloon for a brief memorial service. Herman knickerbocker came in from his prospect hole to deliver the eulogy.
It was recorded by a shorthand stenographer and printed in Nevada newspapers. It endures as a small treasure of Nevada literature.
David W. Toll, Gold Hill, Nevada
Herman Knickerbocker (center) as a single-blanket prospector.
I feel that it is incumbent upon me to state that in standing here I occupy no ministerial or prelatic position. I am simply a prospector. I make no claims whatever to moral merit or to religion except the religion of humanity, the brotherhood or man. I stand among you today simply as a man among men, feeling that I can shake hands and say “brother” to the vilest man or woman that ever lived. If there should come to you anything of moral admonition through what I may say, it comes not from any sense of moral superiority, but from the depth of my experience.
Riley Grannan was born in Paris, Kentucky, about 40 years ago. I suppose he dreamed all the dreams of boyhood. They blossomed into phenomenal success along financial lines at times during his life. I am told that from the position of a bell boy in a hotel he rose rapidly to be a celebrity of world-wide fame. He was one of the greatest plungers, probably, that the continent has ever produced.
He died day before yesterday in Rawhide.
This is a very brief statement. You have the birth and the period of the grave. Who can fill the interim? Who can speak of his hopes and fears? Who can solve the mystery of his quiet hours that only himself know? I cannot.
He was born in the sunny Southland, in Kentucky. He died in Rawhide.
Here is the beginning and the end. I wonder if we can see in this a picture of what Ingersoll said at the grave of his brother– “Whether it be near the shore or in mid-ocean or among the breakers, at the last a wreck must mark the end of one and all.”
turn page