Herman Willis Knickerbocker was retired from the ministry when he died at age 66 after a short illness at his home, 2127 Bissonett Avenue in Houston. The obituary read: "Death came quietly to the veteran minister who retired from the pulpit after an eventful career that saw him forsake his profession for nine years to go into the raw west and amass a fortune only to have it crumble overnight."
Rev. Knickerbocker entered the ministry in 1892. In 1901, he was pastor of Trinity Methodist Church in Los Angeles, but he abruptly left the pulpit, and went into the real estate business with his brother Clarence. After losing money in that profession, Herman turned to the lure of mining gold in Nevada. "He was one of the first nine men to reach paydirt in Goldfield, Nev. He built his grubstake when he opened his Shakespearean opera house."
Herman was widely known for his poetic speech. Frank X. Tolbert profiled him in a July 27, 1960 column in The Dallas Morning News.
"Herman was a fascinating character. Primarily, he was a wandering prospector who made several hundred thousand dollars out of his mining career and promoting mining townsites. He loved Shakespeare and often recited in highly professional fashion passages from The Bard probably to the complete puzzlement of his rough miner companions. Around 1903 in Tonopah, Nev., he built a frame opera house in which he recited whole Shakespearean dramas.
Herman is best-remembered for his funeral oration at Rawhide, Nev., in April 1908 over the body of his friend, the celebrated gambler, Riley Grannan. "Riley had gotten big play in the newspapers for years because of his monster bets; once he wagered $275,000 on the outcome of one Kentucky horse race. But when he died in Rawhide, he was broke." Knickerbocker's funeral address was delivered from the stage of Rawhide's Princess Variety Theater, across the street from Tex Rickard's gambling hall. One of Tex's employees, a former court reporter known as "Rattlesnake Shorty" took down Knickerbocker's remarks in shorthand. A man named George Graham Rice said, "When all the gold in Rawhide's towering hills shall have been reduced to bullion and not even a post is left to guide the desert wayfarer to the spot where was witnessed the greatest stampede in western mining history, posterity will remember Rawhide for the funeral oration that was pronounced over the bier of Riley Grannan by H. W. Knickerbocker." His speech has been reprinted several times in western publications.
Herman eventually returned to the ministry and served Methodist congregations every two or three years, mostly in the southwestern U.S.