William Frank Carver - Wild West Show

Wild West Show

About this same time, Carver went into partnership with Buffalo Bill Cody to put a Wild West show on the road. The grand opening of the “Wild West: Hon. W. F. Cody and Dr. W. F. Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition” was in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 17, 1883. Their series of shooting matches completed, both Carver and Bogardus joined the show in Omaha. The show was an immediate success, but the relationship between the two showmen, Carver and Cody, was contentious from the beginning. At the end of the season they parted ways and divided the assets by the flip of a coin. Cody then formed a partnership with the promoter and showman Nate Salsbury, and the show continued as “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.”

Doc Carver reorganized and put his own show, also billed as the “Wild West,” on the road. As the two shows criss-crossed the country for the next few years, Carver and Cody engaged in legal wrangling over a variety of issues. The foremost points of dispute were the use of the Wild West name and Carver’s assertion that Cody still owed him $27,000 that Carver claimed he had invested in the original show. July 1885 found both shows in Connecticut and the New York Times reported: “An interminable row has broken out in this State between Dr. Carver, the marksman, and Buffalo Bill. They have been running rival shows under the same title of ‘Wild West’…” A trial, intended to end the suits and countersuits, was set for July 20, 1885. Cody failed to appear, however, so Carver agreed to dismiss his suit for $10,000 cash and Salsbury’s offer to pay the court costs. The two old friends remained bitter enemies for the rest of their lives.

His show broken up, Carver did not have the financial resources to reorganize. For the next few years he appeared as a featured act in several outdoor shows. By 1889 he had secured financial partners and organized his own show, “Wild America.” Carver launched a world-wide tour and though he covered much of the same circuit as Cody, the two shows avoided each other until August 1890 when Carver’s show arrived in Hamburg, Germany, ahead of Cody’s. Carver’s claim to exclusive use of the available electric lights left Cody’s show in the dark and added further hostility to the fierce competition between the two showmen. In December 1890 Carver shipped his “Wild America” troupe to Australia, where it was received with enthusiasm.

In conjunction with the outdoor exhibition, Carver had added a dramatic play, and on his return to the United States in early 1892 launched a tour of both productions across the country. An economic depression, however, had spread across the country by the early 1890s. In addition, a number of similar shows were touring the country, and they were no longer an entertainment novelty. For these and other reasons, Carver’s show disbanded sometime in 1893. Doc Carver had continued to give shooting exhibitions and to challenge competitors while on tour both in the United States and abroad. After seventeen years as the “Champion Shot of the World” Carver gave one of his last public exhibitions in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1896. Noting that Carver refused to tell his age, but that he looked fifteen years younger than his real age, the State Journal reported: “Dr. W. F. Carver, the champion shot of the world, has been giving exhibitions of his wonderful skill in rifle, shotgun and horseback shooting this week at Lincoln park that mystified, surprised and astonished the audience present…”