Butte, Montana, hopes to stay Evel

When the kid backed up to the end of the street, a thousand pairs of eyes looked his way. Straddling his bike — a red, white and blue machine covered in stars and stripes and his name, Levi Renz — he kick-started the engine, let the machine cough to life and hunched forward as he rode its chainsaw buzz toward the ramp.

When Renz hit it for the first time, he flew up and up and up, higher than the light posts, higher than the flat roof of the auto shop, higher than he had ever flown in his life. And every face in the crowd — folks with cans of cheap beer and cigarettes in hand, bikers in leather vests, girls in bikini tops, moms with strollers — turned to watch the kid fly like a bright white shooting star crossing the afternoon sky.

Butte, Montana, held its breath.

When the people of Butte gather every summer for Evel Knievel Days, a celebration of its most famous son — the notorious rebel and stuntman Robert “Evel” Knievel — they scream as motorcycles fly, as men set themselves on fire and jump out of helicopters and fling themselves from 12 stories with no parachute. This is a town that loves to see a potential disaster.

But it’s as if the people at Evel Knievel Days aren’t just waiting for a crash. It’s as if they’re hoping for the unbelievable, waiting for their own boys to prove that here in the heart of the West — in this place that once burned so bright and is shunned by the rest of the Big Sky State — is where magic really happens.

For a period earlier this year, the future of the 12-year-old festival started by Evel Knievel himself was uncertain. The Knievel family clashed with festival organizers, arguing over naming rights and fighting over whether the festival should be a biker party or an extreme sports festival. A media circus ensued when Kelly Knievel, the daredevil’s eldest son, verbally threatened to “destroy” festival organizers if they didn’t make changes. Newspapers questioned if the festival might end for good.

When organizers backed out with just four months to spare, the Knievel family took the reins. “It’s supposed to be a family-friendly event and was literally created to inspire the children of Butte,” Alicia Knievel Vincent, Knievel’s youngest child, said just days before the festival. “Honestly, I wish my dad could see what we’ve done.”

But for Butte, a town that imploded when the mining industry left nearly everyone unemployed here and has limped along while the rest of the Big Sky State thrived, this isn’t just a festival of thrills. It’s an annual celebration by a once-lawless town trying to remember who it is. And if anyone personified that, it was Evel Knievel, the man who suffered broken bones and became famous for bad ideas. A man who, somehow, kept getting back up again.

When the world thinks of the great American West, it visualizes places like Butte: towns buried deep in mountain ranges, places where fortunes were dug from rich veins running deep under the earth’s skin. It’s where rough laborers fought for their rights and lost their lives underground. Over the years, when the whistles blew at the end of each day, thousands of miners were carried out in bodybags. Butte propped up the single mothers and fatherless children left behind.

This is a town of a million nicknames. The Richest Hill on Earth. The Gibraltar of Labor. The City of Champions. The Can-Do City. The Mining City. The Copper City.

But it’s also been called the ugliest city on earth. Where cities like Bozeman and Livingston, Mont. sit in lush green mountain valleys, Butte sits on the edge of the Berkeley Pit — a yellow and brown gash in the earth left from 150 years of mining here. One of America’s largest EPA Superfund sites, the pit is a scar so large it can be seen from space.

The mining deaths, the rough labor unions and the unfathomable pollution here alone have earned Butte a bad reputation in the state. Butte residents are often called “Butte Rats” by outsiders. And it’s a place like no other.

Butte-Silver Bow Chief Executive Matt Vincent, who is married to Alicia Knievel Vincent, says there’s a unique pride held by people who live here. “The pride of being such an impactful and important place for so many years in so many ways is still deeply instilled in the people that live here,” Vincent says. “It was one of the world leaders in copper production. That’s where some of the pride came from. It wasn’t a glorified pride — they worked and died in the mines.”

And when mining all but closed here, the town fought to stay alive.

Like it always had, Butte embraced its wounds: creating jobs in environmental cleanup, and even turning the toxic pit into a tourist attraction.

But Vincent says that the biggest challenge he faces while in office is marketing. How can he embrace the rough-and-tumble reputation image of Butte while keeping the city approachable enough to attract business?

“There aren’t many places where you can mine continuously for 150 years. We still have about 40 years left, but we have to start planning and making changes dramatically so we can survive,” he says. But folks here are wary of change.

“[People here] can’t see the fact that the whole premise of this town has been adapting and improvising and overcoming,” Vincent says, “And if we don’t grasp onto that spirit that got us here, we could lose it.”