Life of Evel: Evel Knievel Read Free

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