William Frank Carver - Shooting Career

Shooting Career

Carver migrated to California in 1876 where he honed his shooting skills. At about this time he coined the moniker “Evil Spirit,” accompanied by a “camp-fire tale” that the name had been given to him by Spotted Tail, the famous chief of the Brule Lakota, because Carver had felled a rare white buffalo. In December 1877 the "Evil Spirit" issued a challenge to all comers; he would use a rifle and the challenger could use a shot gun, and the targets would be glass balls thrown from the newly invented Bogardus glass ball trap. He also contended that he could hit more targets from horseback than a challenger could hit while standing on the ground. One of the first significant awards Carver won was for breaking 885 glass balls out of 1000 at San Francisco on February 22, 1878. The gold badge was capped with the image of a grizzly bear and bore an inscription that proclaimed Dr. W. F. Carver as “Champion Rifle Shot of the World.” Following his success in California, Carver went on tour giving exhibitions of shooting prowess, which included endurance contests as well as target competitions. An article from the July 6, 1878 New York Times illustrates the reception Carver received:

Dr. W. F. Carver, the man who can put a bullet through a silver quarter while the coin is flying through the air, is an enlarged and revised edition of Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack. Being fresh from the broad plains of the untrammeled West, he has that delightful air of unconventionality to be found only in the land of the setting sun... Dr. Carver is, no doubt, the best short-range marksman in the world. He gave his second exhibition at Deerfoot Park yesterday, and astonished everybody who saw him. He is as fine a specimen of fully developed manhood as ever walked on Manhattan Island. More than six feet high, every part of his body is built to correspond. His chest is so deep that it would take a powerful rifle to send a bullet through it. His shoulders are broad and high, and, altogether, he is exactly the man that ordinary people wouldn’t put themselves out of the way to pick a quarrel with... The scene of yesterday’s shooting is worthy of description. A... table, on which were four rifles, several boxes of cartridges, and half a dozen score-books. Fifteen or 20 feet in front of this, again, a barrel and a man, the man taking the glass balls out of the barrel and throwing them in the air, and Dr. Carver breaking them with the bullets as fast as they appeared. Somebody was always at work loading a rifle. The marksman could fire them faster than the loaders could load. And they were the most remarkable rifles – breach-loaders, of course. When they were opened at the end one cartridge was shoved in after another, till it seemed as if the first one must surely be somewhere up by the muzzle... He seldom misses what he fires at. Most of the time was taken up in shooting glass balls, filled with feathers. The balls were of the thinnest film of glass, slightly tinted, so as to be seen easily in the air, and when they broke, the feathers scattered in every direction...

Carver also joined the ranks of western figures that embellished their frontier credentials by writing books. In 1878 he put out a book titled Life of Dr. Wm. F. Carver of California: Champion Rifle Shot of the World, which, though it contains entirely fictionalized versions of his early life, does include extracts from the press coverage of his first shooting tour across the country.

On August 20, 1878, while in New Haven, Connecticut, Carver was married to Josephine Dailey, whom he had met on a previous trip. Very little is known about the marriage as Carver’s biographer only mentions Josephine in several brief references in the first few years following the marriage. It appears she was a marginal presence in Carver’s life throughout his early years as a showman and apparently they later separated. It is known that the Carvers had two children, Al and Lorena, both of whom were eventually involved in their father’s diving horse act.