William Frank Carver

William Frank "Doc" Carver (May 7, 1851 – August 31, 1927) was a late 19th-century sharpshooter and the creator of a popular diving horse attraction. He was born in Winslow, Illinois, to William Daniel Carver, a physician, and Deborah Tohapenes (Peters) Carver (1829–1907), who had migrated to Illinois from Pennsylvania in 1849. He had a younger brother, William Pitt, who became a farmer in Kansas, and a sister, May, who was born in May 1856 and died before the age of two.

There seems to be no creditable information about Carver's childhood, as the contradictions in stories he told classify them as entertainment rather than fact. For most of his adult life Carver gave the year of his birth as 1840, but it is likely he did so in order to enlarge the time frame needed to create stories of frontier experience for his admiring audiences after he became a showman. Carver's biographer, Raymond Thorp, wrote that Carver left home at a young age to assert his family's right to land in Minnesota that the Sioux had supposedly granted his grandfather, Jonathan Carver, and that during this period of time he lived with the Santee Sioux. This contention, however, like other claims made by Carver about his early life and never investigated by his biographer, does not withstand the scrutiny of reputable historians.

Carver was trained as a dentist and hence acquired the nickname "Doc". He migrated to the West in 1872, where he practiced dentistry at Fort McPherson, Nebraska, and North Platte, Nebraska. He later attempted to distance himself from his early profession as a dentist, but the name "Doc" clung for life. At Fort McPherson he met Buffalo Bill Cody, Texas Jack Omohundro, and other well-known figures of the day. In November 1872 he moved to the newly organized Frontier County, Nebraska, in the company of Ena Raymonde, a southern belle from Georgia, whose brother W. H. "Paddy" Miles had recently established a trapper's camp known as Wolf's Rest on Medicine Creek. Carver took a claim near Wolf's Rest, and it was here that he began to acquire the target shooting, horseback riding, and hunting skills that would lead to his later success as a world-class marksman. Raymonde, a recognized markswoman, who had been challenged to shoot by Buffalo Bill Cody and Texas Jack Omohundro, is credited with playing a part in teaching Carver to shoot. An entry from Raymonde's 1872 journal reveals insights into Carver as a young man and also portrays the prevailing enthusiasm for shooting sports in the 19th century: "Sunday afternoon we all…went to see a prairie-dog town! We went at half-speed or better all the way. Shot about 200 rounds; the Dr. doing the most of the business of shooting if not killing..."

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