Robert Craig Knievel was born on October 17, 1938, in Butte, Montana, the first of two children of Robert E. Knievel and Ann Marie Keough Knievel. His parents divorced when he was young, and both parents left Butte, so Robert and his younger brother, Nicolas, were raised in the city by their paternal grandparents, Ignatius and Emma Knievel. The Butte of his childhood was a hard-working copper mining city, famous as the Richest Hill on Earth, and it prized toughness, nerve, and showmanship.
Young Knievel was an accomplished athlete at Butte High School, where he competed in track and field, ice hockey, and ski jumping. In 1957 he won the Northern Rocky Mountain Ski Association Class A men's ski jumping championship. He left high school after his sophomore year and went to work, and one of his jobs was in the copper mines of Butte. Encyclopaedia Britannica records that he once caused a citywide power outage by crashing an earthmover into the main power line while attempting wheelies with the machine.
His famous name came, by popular account, from his brushes with the law. After a police chase in 1956, he spent a night in jail, and the story holds that he was nicknamed "Evil Knievel" there. He later changed the spelling to "Evel" because he did not want to be thought of as evil, and the name became his legal name. As a boy of eight, he had seen Joey Chitwood's automobile daredevil show, and he later credited that performance with planting the idea for his own career.
Knievel performed his first motorcycle stunt in his late twenties to draw customers to a motorcycle shop that he co-owned. For that early performance he jumped over rows of parked cars, a caged mountain lion, and a box of rattlesnakes. From 1965 to 1968 he performed with a troupe called Evel Knievel's Motorcycle Daredevils, and then he set out on a solo career. Dressed in his trademark star-spangled red, white, and blue leathers, he attempted dozens of ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps during his career, and audiences across the country learned to associate his name with Butte, Montana.
His most famous stunt came on December 31, 1967, when he attempted to jump the fountains at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. He cleared the fountains but crashed badly on the landing, and he suffered a crushed pelvis and other serious fractures. He spent nearly a month in a coma, and the film of the crash made him nationally famous. He returned to jumping the following year, and his later performances included a jump over fifty cars at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1973 and an attempt to jump thirteen buses at Wembley Stadium in London in 1975, which also ended in a crash from which he walked away.
On September 8, 1974, Knievel made his most ambitious attempt, a crossing of the Snake River Canyon near Twin Falls, Idaho, in a steam-powered rocket called the Skycycle X-2. The vehicle's parachute deployed prematurely just after launch, and the Skycycle drifted down into the canyon. Knievel survived with minor injuries. His jumps were shown repeatedly on national television, including on ABC's Wide World of Sports, and they made him one of the most recognizable entertainers in America during the 1970s.
Knievel was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1999, and one of his motorcycles has been displayed by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He died in Clearwater, Florida, on November 30, 2007, at the age of sixty-nine. His funeral was held at the Butte Civic Center, and he was buried on December 10, 2007, at Mountain View Cemetery in Butte, the hometown he had never stopped claiming. Butte returned the affection in 2002, when the first Evel Knievel Days festival was held in his honor. For many years the summer festival drew thousands of visitors to Uptown Butte, and it confirmed what his career had already shown. Butte's most famous son had carried the Mining City's name around the world, and the Mining City was proud to carry his.
Photo: Evel Knievel in his stars-and-stripes leathers in front of his Florida home in the 1970s. Photograph by Bill Wolf / Sean (Flickr), CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.