Throughout his career Knievel never missed the chance to tell the press and the people where he came from. He was proud of his roots in the tough, former mining town and probably realised more than most just how much that upbringing had shaped the man he became. There is no widely acknowledged birthplace for daredevils, but if they’re going to come from somewhere it may as well be Butte, Montana. It certainly provided Robert Craig Knievel with all the right stuff to become the most famous daredevil the world has ever known.
‘In Butte, if you weren’t a pimp or a thief you were nothing. And I needed a few bucks to get out.’
Situated in southwest Montana, approximately halfway between the Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, Butte is the largest city in the state, even though its population only numbered 33,892 citizens during the census of the year 2000. The figure speaks volumes about the decline in the town following the closure of the copper mining pits it was once famous for; one hundred years ago there would easily have been 100,000 entries on the census.
Butte was founded on a collection of small mining claims and eventually became a massively prosperous mining centre in the early part of the twentieth century. Described as ‘the richest hill on earth’ for more than 100 years due to the wealth of ore lying beneath its surface, the town was once the most important source of copper anywhere in the world, with 2,590 miles of tunnels connected by 41 miles of vertical shafts – some of which reached 6,000 feet down – allowing access to the valuable commodity. It is also home to the famous Berkeley Pit, once the biggest truck-operated open-pit copper mine in the United States.
Where there’s copper there are usually miners, and where there are miners there’s always a lively, noisy, hard-living community. Butte was no exception. If there was any exception, it was that the city was even livelier, noisier and harder-living than most of its peers, operating largely as it did by its own rules and code of conduct, much like the pioneer towns of the old Wild West.
To live in Butte was to work hard and play hard. At one time the city was reputed to have more bars per capita than any other city in the US – and for almost every bar there was a brothel. Such was the importance of brothels in Butte until very recent times that one of the more famous examples, the Dumas Brothel, has now been turned into a museum to celebrate the city’s sinful past. With miners working shifts round the clock, many bars in Butte were open twenty-four hours a day and there were always prostitutes on hand to accommodate the miners. At one time there were no fewer than 500 women working the red-light-district area of Butte.
As far back as 1863 the area surrounding Butte had been famed for its gold deposits, and when they ran out of this the prospectors found an abundance of silver in the same Tobacco Root Mountains. When the silver too was mined to exhaustion it could have spelled the end of mining in the area, and the city of Butte might never have developed as it did. But the discovery of vast resources of copper kept the prospectors coming, and this would prove to last much longer than the sources of silver and gold. Copper was the making of Evel Knievel’s hometown, just as his hometown was the making of Evel Knievel.
With large companies like the Anaconda Copper Mining Company (which Knievel would later work for) establishing big-time operations, mining work became plentiful and by 1917 the population of Butte had soared to upwards of 100,000 people. It would never again reach this peak but while it did the city was an absolute haven of all the major vices: gambling, drinking and prostitution were practised on a scale not seen since the days of Dodge City and Tombstone in the previous century, and the rough, tough copper miners were just as ready with their guns as the outlaws of the Wild West had been. Butte was one tough town.
But it was not only populated with hard-drinking, hardgambling and prostitute-friendly miners, it was also home to a new breed of millionaires who had made their money from the mines without actually having had to work in them. It was this nouveau-riche clientele who made possible the construction of the resplendent parlours, brothels, bars and hotels which set Butte aside, at least aesthetically, from the other rough-and-tumble mining towns. The presence of great wealth was evident even as drunks lay in the streets and men shot each other over card games. It was a town of contrasts and a town where a fast buck could always be made by anyone who was prepared to operate on the wrong side of the law.
The Wild West mentality hadn’t entirely subsided by 1938 when an unremarkable couple named Robert Edward Knievel and Ann Knievel (née Keaugh) had their first child on 17 October who they called Robert Craig Knievel. As the Knievels would soon discover, it was not the ideal time or environment to raise a child. The town was already a rough place and the great depression of the 1930s wasn’t making things any easier. Jobs were hard to come by, money was scarce and a world war was just around the corner; a war which would eventually damage the economy even further.
Robert senior was a handsome man of German ancestry, while his young wife could trace her own family roots back to Ireland. The uncommon surname of Knievel can be traced to Germany as far back as 1265 with a family coat of arms that places great emphasis on ‘military fortitude and magnanimity’. While the name is unusual, the hard pronunciation of the ‘K’ in Knievel is genuine and not an American corruption, nor is it a gimmick dreamed up by its famous bearer to enhance the rhythmic qualities of his stage name.
For reasons he has never openly discussed, presumably because the subject-matter remains a source of some anguish, Bobby Knievel’s parents separated in 1940 when he was just under 18 months old and not long after Ann Knievel had given birth to another child, Bobby’s younger brother Nick. It was not an uncommon scenario under the circumstances. Living conditions were extremely tough for any young family in America during the great depression and having two young children to clothe and feed stretched many families to breaking point. The Knievels were no exception. Knowing they would struggle to provide a stable and secure upbringing for their children, the decision was taken to hand the boys over to their paternal grandparents, Emma and Ignatious Knievel. While Robert Senior believed a brighter future might lie in California, Ann moved to Nevada, and the young Knievel brothers were left with their grandparents in a small house on Parrot Street in Butte, unaware at such a young age of exactly what was happening to them and why.
Ignatious J. Knievel owned a tyre shop in Butte and worked long hours trying to make it more profitable than it actually was. While it was no gold mine it did put food on the table and clothes on Bobby and Nick, a burden the ageing couple could well have done without but a duty they fulfilled to the best of their ability. With Ignatious devoting so much time to the shop it fell mostly to Emma to raise the boys and instil in them the rights and wrongs, the do’s and don’ts, that would prepare them for life in a difficult world.
Having been taken in by their grandparents at such an early age, Bobby and Nick quite comfortably and naturally called them ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ and, apart from the greater age gap, life in the small Knievel house probably felt much like that of any other working-class family in Butte. There wasn’t much to go around and survival was a daily struggle, as Evel explained many years later: ‘Everything that my grandparents got they worked morning, noon and night for. Nothing was ever given to them and nothing was given to me; I either worked for it or stole it.’
As soon as Bobby and Nick were old enough to play outside in the streets they found out what it really meant to be a resident of Butte. Pimps, prostitutes and drunks were everywhere, and one of the boys’ earliest childhood pastimes was throwing stones at prostitutes in order to bait their pimps into chasing them down the street. And it wasn’t as if Bobby had to go out of his way to locate the city’s prostitutes; a good many of them were working quite literally on his doorstep. ‘There were 500 prostitutes working in one square block on Mercury and Gallina Street and my grandfather’s tyre shop was right on Gallina Street. I was raised right in it. Blonde Edna’s whorehouse was right across the street from it [his grandparents’ house] and Dirty Mouth Mary’s was on the other side.’
When he came of age, Knievel