William Frank Carver

Who was William Frank Carver?

William Frank "Doc" Carver was a late 19th-century sharpshooter and creator of a popular diving horse attraction. He was born at Winslow, Illinois, to William Daniel Carver, a physician, and Deborah Tohapenes Carver. The parents 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 who died before the age of two. There seems to be no creditable information regarding 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 add 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 the other claims made by Carver about his early life and never investigated by his biographer, does not stand the scrutiny of recognized historians.