From Copper Hill to National Icon:

Evel Knievel and the Making of a Montana Legend

Origins: The Richest Hill on Earth

Robert Craig Knievel was born on October 17, 1938, at Silver Bow County Hospital in Butte, Montana, the first child of Robert E. Knievel and Ann Marie Keough Knievel. His parents divorced in 1940 and both left Butte, leaving Robert and his younger brother Nicolas to be raised by their paternal grandparents, Ignatius and Emma Knievel, on the same terrain that had shaped generations of working-class Montanans before them. It was an upbringing defined by absence, resilience, and the distinctive cultural character of a city built on copper.

Butte in the late 1930s and 1940s was a city carrying the weight of its own mythology. Once described as “The Richest Hill on Earth,” it had peaked as a global copper production center between roughly 1887 and 1920, drawing immigrant workers from Ireland, Cornwall, Finland, Croatia, Italy, and China into a dense, argumentative urban environment unlike anywhere else in the Rocky Mountain West. By the time the Knievel boys were coming of age, the copper economy had contracted sharply, but the city’s identity had not softened. As the Butte-Silver Bow government’s own historical account notes, the influx of miners had given the city “its hardscrabble reputation as a place where anything was possible” — an ethos of masculine risk-taking and working-class defiance that would find its fullest expression in one of the city’s own sons (Butte-Silver Bow, “History and Culture”).

The Anaconda Copper Mining Company dominated the local economy when Knievel dropped out of Butte High School after his sophomore year and took a job as a diamond drill operator in the mines. His tenure underground was brief. He was fired, according to multiple accounts, after performing a motorcycle-style wheelie with a large earthmover and driving it into Butte’s main power line, cutting electricity to the city for several hours (Evel Knievel Official, “The Man”). The story, improbable as it sounds, is consistent across the documentary record and illustrates the pattern that would define his entire life: an instinct for spectacle that was genuine rather than calculated, and a disregard for conventional consequences that was less a philosophy than a reflex.

The Nickname and the Early Years

The story of how Robert Knievel became “Evel Knievel” belongs to the small hours of 1956. Following a police chase that ended in a motorcycle crash, Knievel was taken to the Butte city jail on a charge of reckless driving. When the night jailer made his rounds, he found Robert Knievel in one cell and a local man named William Knofel — known around town as “Awful Knofel,” the nickname rhyming with his surname — in another. The comparison stuck, and Knievel adopted the moniker, changing the spelling deliberately from “Evil” to “Evel” to sidestep, as he later explained, the connotation of genuine menace (Evel Knievel Official, “The Man”).

What followed in Butte was a decade of restlessness that confirmed both his athleticism and his unreliability. He won the Northern Rocky Mountain Ski Association Class A Men’s Ski Jumping Championship in 1957, served briefly in the U.S. Army as a paratrooper volunteer, and played semi-professional ice hockey after returning to civilian life, founding a team called the Butte Bombers. He also operated a hunting guide service he called Sur-Kill, which guaranteed clients an animal or their money back — a promise he backed by poaching elk from Yellowstone National Park until game wardens shut the operation down (EBSCO Research Starters, “Evel Knievel”). He worked as an insurance salesman with enough aggressive persistence to break a district record for policies sold in a single week, reportedly by selling to patients and staff at a Montana state mental hospital. He married Linda Joan Bork in 1959 and began raising a family.

The through-line of this period is not chaos but calculation of a rough kind. Knievel was attempting, repeatedly, to construct a viable commercial identity in a city and a region where the traditional economic structures were narrowing. The mines offered less than they once had. The frontier service economy of hunting guides and rural insurance was uncertain. He had read W. Clement Stone’s motivational text Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude and absorbed its precepts about self-belief as a material force (City Journal, “Remembering Evel Knievel”). The motorcycle, which he had ridden since adolescence, was the instrument that would finally let those precepts pay.

The Career Begins: Daredevils for Hire

In January 1966, Knievel formed Evel Knievel’s Motorcycle Daredevils and staged his first professional performance at the National Date Festival in Indio, California. The act was modest by what would follow: jumps over boxes of rattlesnakes and a pair of mountain lions, interspersed with other stunts. But Knievel had a self-promotional instinct that his contemporaries in the stunt world largely lacked. He understood, intuitively, that the crowd was not simply watching a physical feat but auditioning a persona — and the persona he offered was that of the last American cowboy, translated into the idiom of the internal combustion engine.

By late 1967, Knievel had built enough regional notoriety to set his ambitions on a larger stage. He identified the fountains at the newly opened Caesars Palace hotel and casino in Las Vegas as an ideal venue and spent weeks persuading casino CEO Jay Sarno to host a jump on New Year’s Eve 1967. To secure the meeting, Knievel fabricated a corporation called Evel Knievel Enterprises, invented three fictional lawyers, and placed calls to Sarno’s office impersonating representatives from ABC and Sports Illustrated (Wikipedia, “Evel Knievel”). The deception was characteristic — not of a con man without conscience, but of a man who understood that the gap between what he was and what he needed to appear to be required active bridging.

The Caesars Palace Jump: Fame Through Failure

On December 31, 1967, Knievel attempted to clear the ornamental fountains in front of Caesars Palace on a Triumph Bonneville T120. He cleared the fountains. The landing destroyed him. His bike wobbled on contact, throwing him over the handlebars and into a tumbling, concrete-grinding crash that broke his pelvis, femur, hip, wrist, and ankles and knocked him unconscious for twenty-nine days (Smithsonian Magazine, “This Woeful Wipeout”). He had arranged for the jump to be filmed on the understanding that ABC might broadcast the footage. ABC broadcast it repeatedly.

It is difficult to overstate how much this single event shaped the subsequent arc of Knievel’s career. The crash made him famous in a way that successful jumps could not have, because it demonstrated something a successful jump cannot demonstrate: that the risk was real. American audiences in 1968 were navigating the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the broadening catastrophe of Vietnam, and a cultural fracture that made straightforward heroism feel inadequate to the moment. A man who failed publicly and catastrophically and then returned to attempt the same thing again offered something different — not invincibility, but persistence. As Smithsonian Magazine’s article on the incident noted, the Caesars Palace crash “cemented his legendary status” not despite its violence but because of it (Smithsonian Magazine, “This Woeful Wipeout”).

The Zenith: Wide World of Sports and the 1970s

The decade from approximately 1969 to 1979 was the center of gravity of Knievel’s public life. His nationally televised motorcycle jumps became some of the most-watched programs in the history of ABC’s Wide World of Sports, with five of his performances ranking among the show’s twenty highest-rated broadcasts (Smithsonian Magazine, “Daredevil”). He jumped nineteen cars at the Ontario Motor Speedway in California in February 1971, setting a new world record. He sold over 100,000 tickets to back-to-back performances at the Houston Astrodome in January of the same year. The Ideal Toy Company released a line of Evel Knievel merchandise that generated over $125 million in sales between 1972 and 1977 (Wikipedia, “Evel Knievel”).

His visual brand was as important as the stunts themselves. The red, white, and blue leathers — which he wore not as a flag but as a claim on a particular national mythology — placed him in the tradition of barnstorming America, the promotional culture of P.T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill, refracted through the television age. He promoted Butte, Montana, as explicitly as he promoted himself. Wherever he performed, the words “Butte, Montana — Home of the Richest Hill on Earth” appeared prominently on his vehicles (Christian Science Monitor, “A Small Town’s Stunt”). The marketing was also sincere. Knievel maintained a genuine attachment to his hometown that was more than useful to his brand.

The Snake River Canyon and the Beginning of the End

In 1971, while flying back to Butte from a performance tour, Knievel looked from his aircraft window and saw the Snake River Canyon in southern Idaho. The canyon offered something the Grand Canyon, his original target, never would: it was on private property and could be leased. He spent three years promoting a plan to cross the canyon in a steam-powered rocket vehicle called the Skycycle X-2, designed by former Aerojet engineer Robert Truax (Wikipedia, “Evel Knievel”). Montana Governor Tom Judge declared September 8, 1974, to be Evel Knievel Day throughout the state, and the Butte High School Band — whose members included future eyewitnesses to the event — attended as Knievel’s guests, the Purple Bz drill team performing alongside them in the canyon heat (Billings Gazette, “Butte High Band”).

The jump failed. The Skycycle’s drogue parachute deployed prematurely as the vehicle left the ramp, dragging it down into the canyon rather than across it. Knievel was pulled from the wreckage by men in rowboats and returned to Butte the following day, where roughly a thousand people met him at Bert Mooney Airport. He told the crowd simply, “I gave it my best” (Montana Standard, “Butte’s Own Knievel Canyon Jump”). The damaged Skycycle was placed on display at Knievel Imports, his motorcycle dealership at 100 East Galena Street in Butte, for a week afterward. For all the promotional spectacle and genuine physical risk of the Snake River attempt, what the documentary record from Montana’s newspapers and archives most clearly shows is that the event remained, for Butte, a matter of civic pride rather than embarrassment.

The event marked the climax of Knievel’s commercial career. Reporting from Cycle News at the time reflected the ambivalence of professional motorcycle culture toward Knievel — respected for the spectacle he generated for the industry, regarded skeptically as a showman whose talents were promotional rather than technical. His four-second airborne moments, as Cycle News observed, crowded out attention from champions like Kenny Roberts and Roger DeCoster who competed across full races and motos (Cycle News, “Archives Column”). But for the general American public, Knievel remained at the center of a particular national conversation about risk, spectacle, and the performance of courage.

Decline and Complexity

The last sustained chapter of Knievel’s career was marked by a series of decisions that accelerated his fall from public prominence. In September 1977, he approached Shelly Saltman — the promoter who had organized the Snake River jump and subsequently written a book about the experience that Knievel found deeply offensive — in the parking lot of 20th Century Fox Studios in Los Angeles and attacked him with an aluminum baseball bat. Saltman raised his arm to protect his head; his arm was shattered and required permanent steel plating. Knievel pleaded guilty to battery and served six months in a work furlough program. A subsequent civil judgment against him totaled $12.75 million, a sum he never paid (AP, via Tucson.com, “Victim of Evel Knievel Bat Attack”). Harley-Davidson withdrew its sponsorship. Ideal Toys terminated its licensing agreement. He declared bankruptcy.

The assault on Saltman is not easily reconciled with the image Knievel carefully maintained, but it is also not separable from it. The persona — self-made, answerable to no one, operating by a personal code outside social convention — had always implied a capacity for violence as well as courage. What the public had celebrated as daring, expressed in physical risk-taking on a motorcycle, the assault revealed as a willingness to dominate through force when other instruments failed. Biographer Leigh Montville, in his 2011 work Evel: The High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel, described his subject as “a one-man ethical dilemma” who pursued fame and fortune with an appetite that his own moral framework could not consistently govern (Montville 287).

He retired from active jumping in 1980. His health deteriorated through the 1990s, shaped by decades of skeletal damage, a liver transplant in 1999 following a hepatitis C diagnosis traced to his many blood transfusions, and the progressive deterioration of diabetes and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. He died in Clearwater, Florida, on November 30, 2007, at the age of sixty-nine.

Return to Butte: Legacy and Memorialization

Knievel’s funeral was held at the Butte Civic Center on December 10, 2007, in a building that seats 7,500 people. Actor Matthew McConaughey delivered the eulogy. Fireworks were launched over the Butte night sky as pallbearers carried the casket inside. He was buried at Mountain View Cemetery in his hometown. The Smithsonian Institution had already designated him “America’s Legendary Daredevil,” a recognition that placed a man who had dropped out of Butte High School in the permanent cultural archive of the nation (Find a Grave, “Evel Knievel”).

The annual Evel Knievel Days festival, first organized in Butte in 2002, has continued as a fixture of the city’s summer calendar, drawing motorcycle enthusiasts from across the country and generating tourist revenue for a city that has navigated the full arc of deindustrialization with considerable difficulty. As the Butte-Silver Bow government’s own calendar notes, the festival is now in its sixteenth year and represents “the world’s only celebration of its kind” in honor of the stuntman (Butte-Silver Bow, “Evel Knievel Days”). Knievel himself helped initiate the event and described Butte’s residents, in a characteristic formulation, as “the best people on Earth” (Evel Knievel Days Official Website).

The Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives maintains an educational packet on Knievel’s life as part of its effort to document the full range of figures who have shaped local and American history. The archives’ framing is instructive: “Every person, through their lives, shapes local and American history. Archives are here to protect that history” (Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, “Evel Knievel”). The institutional decision to include Knievel alongside the city’s miners, labor organizers, and civic builders reflects a mature understanding that historical significance is not synonymous with moral simplicity. Knievel was a complicated person who emerged from a complicated place and managed, for a period of roughly fifteen years, to make that place visible to the world.

What the historical record ultimately supports is this: Robert Craig Knievel was a product of Butte’s particular working-class culture of physical risk, self-invention, and communal pride. He did not transcend his origins so much as he amplified them, projecting onto a national television audience the same qualities — recklessness, persistence, the willingness to absorb punishment in public — that the copper miners of Butte had always understood as the price of getting something done. The crashes were real. The injuries were real. The man behind the red, white, and blue leathers was more complicated than the persona allowed. But the cultural achievement — turning himself into a nationally recognized figure from one of America’s most economically battered small cities — was genuine, and it has outlasted him.

Works Cited

Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives. “Evel Knievel.” Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, https://buttearchives.org/evel-knievel/. Accessed 3 May 2025.

Butte-Silver Bow, City and County. “History and Culture.” Butte-Silver Bow Official Website, https://co.silverbow.mt.us/481/History-Culture. Accessed 3 May 2025.

Butte-Silver Bow, City and County. “Evel Knievel Days.” Butte-Silver Bow Community Calendar, https://www.co.silverbow.mt.us/Calendar.aspx?EID=3710. Accessed 3 May 2025.

“Evel Knievel.” EBSCO Research Starters, EBSCO Information Services, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/biography/evel-knievel. Accessed 3 May 2025.

Evel Knievel Official Website. “The Man.” Evel Knievel Enterprises, https://evelknievel.com/pages/the-man. Accessed 3 May 2025.

Beston, Paul. “Remembering Evel Knievel and His Snake River Canyon Jump.” City Journal, Manhattan Institute, 8 Sept. 2024, https://www.city-journal.org/article/remembering-evel-knievel-and-his-snake-river-canyon-jump. Accessed 3 May 2025.

Edwards, Owen. “Daredevil.” Smithsonian Magazine, Nov. 2008, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/daredevil-20501368/. Accessed 3 May 2025.

Fusco, Juliet. “This Woeful Wipeout Made Evel Knievel an Instant Legend.” Smithsonian Magazine, Smithsonian Institution, 20 Dec. 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/woeful-wipeout-made-evel-knievel-instant-legend-180967601/. Accessed 3 May 2025.

Montville, Leigh. Evel: The High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel: American Showman, Daredevil, and Legend. Doubleday, 2011.

Thornton, Tracy. “Butte High Band Part of Historic Knievel Rocket Jump.” Billings Gazette, 7 Sept. 2024, https://billingsgazette.com/news/local/history/butte-band-part-historic-knievel-rocket-jump/article_ef2da295-e482-571c-bf89-11507e624a83.html. Accessed 3 May 2025.

“Idaho’s Snake River Canyon Jump Took Center Stage.” The Montana Standard, 6 Sept. 2024, https://mtstandard.com/news/local/history/history-butte-own-knievel-canyon-jump/article_70067bd4-66d7-11ef-9279-43986a987607.html. Accessed 3 May 2025.

“Victim of Evel Knievel Bat Attack in 1977 Intends to Collect Money from Daredevil’s Estate.” Associated Press, reprinted in Arizona Daily Star / Tucson.com, 1 Dec. 2007, https://tucson.com/news/national/victim-of-evel-knievel-bat-attack-in-1977-intends-to-collect-money-from-daredevils-estate/article_83f1e751-6617-5096-b947-c3a2a39312a4.html. Accessed 3 May 2025.

Runge, Ryan. “Archives Column: Evel Knievel’s Attempt to ‘Jump’ the Snake River.” Cycle News, 13 Sept. 2024, https://www.cyclenews.com/2024/09/article/archives-column-evel-knievels-attempt-to-jump-the-snake-river/. Accessed 3 May 2025.

Rosen, Jody. “A Small Town’s Stunt: Evel Knievel Week.” The Christian Science Monitor, 2 Aug. 2002, https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0802/p03s01-ussc.html. Accessed 3 May 2025.