Nostalgia for the Old West in Knott’s Berry Farm, Orange County, California

Abstract

Over the last century, western nostalgia has taken on a variety of entertainment forms. From Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows through to Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption video games, the entertainment industry has maintained an emotional attachment to America’s frontier past across a diversity of platforms. Nostalgia has translated into the setting aside of physical spaces across the trans-Mississippi (and beyond) that celebrate a mythic frontier realm. From Yosemite National Park to Dodge City and Deadwood, a range of ‘nostalgic landscapes’ collectively underline the significance of the frontier in American history, to paraphrase Frederick Jackson Turner (Turner 1921, 1), and foster a mass appreciation for nineteenth-century exploration and pioneering. The roster of nostalgic landscapes includes twentieth-century amusement parks, with Knott’s Berry Farm in Southern California one of the earliest examples of an attraction based around frontier values. Knott’s Berry Farm, Orange County, began in the 1920s as a small, family-run farm headed by Walter Knott later linked to boysenberry production. During the Depression era, the Knott family opened a roadside restaurant that proved incredibly popular. In the early 1940s, Walter Knott constructed a Wild West town chiefly as a distraction for customers gathered in long queues outside the restaurant, sometimes waiting three to four hours for their chicken dinners. Knott’s ‘Ghost Town’ represented a paragon exercise in Western nostalgia. Billed as an authentic Wild West experience, the Ghost Town signified a conscious attempt to immortalise what its creator Knott deemed one of America’s proudest historical moments. What started off as a simple distraction soon morphed into a key tourist destination in California. Watching the crowds amass in his new Ghost Town, Knott related, ‘They get so interested that I had to install a loud speaker to call them back to dinner.’ The Knott’s Berry Farm Ghost Town offered a distinctive interactive take on frontier history. Visitors explored a town akin to a Hollywood-style film set, watching performances of live-action drama, playing mechanical amusements, and even listening to wood-carved figures speak to them. The Ghost Town pushed a visceral, entertainmentfocused reading of the West. It blended the feel of older, traditional historic sites like Dodge City with a fresh theme park ambience. Visitors walked amongst gun-toting cowboys, panned for gold, and imagined themselves as virtuous pioneers. The park invited audiences to become active participants in frontier storylines. The first of a wave of Western-themed attractions that opened in the mid-century (and presaging