William Frank Carver - A Plainsman

A Plainsman

Carver was trained as a dentist, hence the nickname "Doc". It was as a dentist that Dr. Carver migrated to the West in 1872, where he practiced dentistry at Fort McPherson, Nebraska, and North Platte, Nebraska. Although he later attempted to distance himself from his early profession as a dentist, the name “Doc” clung for life. It was at Fort McPherson that he first 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 the 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. Ena 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 not only reveals insights into Carver as a young man but 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...”

Although Carver’s actual years as a plainsman were relatively short, he was on the western Nebraska frontier during an exciting era. Conflict between the whites and the Native Americans in the immediate area was decreasing but not eliminated. A remnant band of Lakota Sioux known as the Cut-off Sioux was encamped on the Medicine Creek several miles to the east of Carver’s cabin, and although his claim of having killed the Cut-offs’ old war chief Whistler and two of his braves in late 1872 does not coalesce with the evidence, Carver was certainly in the area during a time of potential and, in some cases, real hostility between the whites and Native Americans.

It was a common practice during the late 19th century for well-heeled men, both from the East and from abroad, to travel to the West to engage in hunting expeditions, and Carver undoubtedly had the opportunity to participate in several of these hunts. Buffalo Bill Cody wrote in his 1879 autobiography that Dr. W. F. Carver, who, in Cody’s words, “has recently acquired considerable notoriety as a rifle-shot,” had joined a hunt at which Cody had been engaged as the guide by the Englishman Thomas P. Medley. Late in 1874 Carver spent two weeks doing dental work at Fort Sidney, following which he moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he continued to practice dentistry.