Read Life of Evel: Evel Knievel for Free Online

board. Bobby would assure his clients that he knew the countryside of Montana so well that he could lead them to whatever game they chose to shoot, thereby guaranteeing them a good day’s hunting. The problem was, much of that game was to be found only in protected national parks and was therefore off limits to hunters. Bobby being Bobby, however, wasn’t about to let a small matter like that stand in the way of business.
    It was during this period of being involved in hunting that one of the stranger episodes of Knievel’s life occurred. Hearing that the US Department of the Interior had decided to cull half of Yellowstone Park’s 10,000-strong elk population to maintain nature’s balance, Bobby decided to intervene in what would prove to be his first ever publicity stunt. He (illegally) shot an elk in the park then cut off its antlers and slung them across his shoulders and set out to hitchhike all the way to Washington DC in protest at the cull. After all, how could a hunting guide like Knievel expect to make any money if there were no more elk to shoot? Bobby, backed by the Montana Fish and Game Commission, wanted to initiate a relocation programme so the elk could be re-homed all over the state for hunters to legitimately shoot. Bobby could then run his business legally.
    Knievel claimed he gave the antlers to President Kennedy himself and told him, ‘If you don’t do something about this immediately your son John-John will look at the head of an elk on a nickel like my kids do the head of a buffalo.’
    Whether or not he actually gained an audience with the president (he was pictured in local newspapers with the antlers but JFK was conspicuously absent) it is nonetheless doubtful that a 22-year-old hitchhiker from Butte would have single-handedly persuaded the government to complete a U-turn on its culling policy. Even so, Knievel had played his part in stirring up publicity for the campaign and the idea was abandoned and a programme instigated whereby the elk were transported to sites across Montana as fair game for hunters. For the elk it was a stay of execution; for Knievel the trip represented a double victory. The first bonus was that Bobby now had some elk he could legally lead his clients to as part of the Sur-Kill experience, but the other plus point was to be far more important in the long-run. Bobby’s picture had appeared in the Washington Post along with details of his plight, proving to Knievel for the first time that publicity wasn’t that hard to come by if you just used a little imagination.
    Hitchhiking may have been his only means of getting to Washington but it had added a novelty factor to the trip, as did the elk antlers. Knievel had discovered he was a natural at promoting himself and his ideas, and the lesson would not be lost on him.
    Somewhat surprisingly, Bobby tired of the hunting game before he could take advantage of the new elk policy and decided to try his hand at a ‘proper’ nine-to-five job as a car insurance salesman with the Combined Insurance Company of America. He was hired by a certain Alex Smith, whom Knievel later acknowledged as being the man who finally helped steer him away from a life of crime and who ‘probably saved my life’ in doing so.
    Knievel has never been short of boasts when talking about his skills as a salesman, but given the phenomenal manner in which he managed to promote and sell himself to the world some years later, they perhaps aren’t completely idle. He claimed he broke all company records for selling 110 policies in one day to staff at the Warm Springs mental hospital in Montana and quipped that he ‘might have even sold some policies to the patients’. There have been comments from more than one party over the years that Knievel in fact sold all those policies to mental patients. Whatever the case, he also claims to have gone on to sell an incredible total of 271 policies in that same week. But, if the stories are to be believed, then