Post by grahamew on Jun 28, 2022 7:47:51 GMT -5
William Frank 'Doc' Carver was a dentist from Winslow, Illinois, who had moved to the North Platte to farm in 1872, but he decided to become a 'frontiersman' wearing buckskins and practising shooting until he became so good that he was able to take his 'Champion Shot of the World' act on the road and to Europe, winning various shooting titles. Like his fellow showmen, he was not short on verbal manure and told the tale of how he had been kidnapped by 'Sioux' warriors as a child (presumably, he wasn't living in Illinois in this version) but they were so in awe of his marskmanship that they grew afraid of him and called him 'Evil Spirit of the Plains.'
He met Cody during a hunt the latter was guiding in 1874 and started claiming they had been friends for years and that he was the better hunter. Nate Salsbury, later Cody's manager, thought Carver was a fake and wanted noting to do with him. In 1883, he worked with Cody in Buffalo Bill and Doc Carver's Wild West, Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition.
Though Carver later claimed to have come up with many ideas for the show, research has shown Cody's hand behind things even then (Louis Warren - Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show, pp.220-221). However, at the end of 1883, they fell out and Cody won a lawsuit in 1885 over who was entitled to use the term, 'Wild West' for their show.
In 1889, Carver teamed up with a new partner, Fred C. Whitney, to tour a show called Wild America, taking 25 Lakota, to Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Helsinki, Warsaw, parts of Sweden and Russia (including St. Petersburg), where Black Owl, an Oglala from Pine Ridge died, and eventually, in 1890, Australia.
'Indian' performers were a staple of such shows and like Cody, Carver drew on the Lakota. When he played San Francisco in 1892, he advertised, 'Splendid Specimens of the Savage Plains; a Band of Warriors from the Tribe of Sitting Bull, who took part in the Battle of Wounded Knee;' in Piedmont, there was a 'Ghost Dance by the Indians who first performed it.' (Sam Maddra - Hostiles? The Lakota Ghost Dance and Buffalo Bill's Wild West (pp.134-5)
The Commissioner of Indian Affairs banned Carver and Whitney from using Indians in 1892 after it was found that they'd coerced some into joining the show, following complaints made by Captain Brown, an officer stationed at Pine Ridge who accused Carver of using James Asay, a trader based in nearby Rushville, of persuading Lakota to visit his store, whereupon he would get them drunk, after which they would be arrested and could only afford the $1000 bail if they joined Carver's show - the railroad conveniently running through Rushville to take them away... The Commissioner let it be known that he advised Indian agents to warn the Lakota that if they joined a show and were stranded abroad, they would receive no help in getting back home, using the example of two Oglala he did help, Eagle Elk and American Bear, who had worked for Cody and then become mysteriously stranded in Australia where they had been repeatedly arrested for vagrancy and being drunk in 1893. No-one knew how they arrived there. Cody hadn't visited Australia, but there was a suspicion was that they had quit part-way through his 1891-2 European tour and somehow afterwards joined Carver and Whitney's Wild America troupe, which was in Australia from late 1890 to 1891. Carver returned his show Indians back to the reservations in1892 and quit showbusiness for a few years. (L.G. Moses - Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883-1933, pp. 124-126).
This is supposed to show 'C.A. Burgess, an interpreter associated with Buffalo Bill's Wild West, and William "Doc" F. Carver, famous sharpshooter and Wild West performer. Henry Edwin Burgess standing at left in the back row, wearing a feather in his hair, buckskin coat, claw necklace, and beaded pants, is identified in period ink on mount verso as Pe-risk-y-la-sharo - Boy Chief. The American Indians are identified as: (front, left) Us-sau-wuk-y - Spotted Horse/ (front, right) Uri-yah-wa-tau-zah - Fighting Elk/ (back, far right) La-toh-cots-tah-ka - White Eagle. With A.E. Dumble, Rochester, NY, 1880 backmark.'
If this is indeed Carver, it would have to have been later than 1880, unless he was just visiting Cody's show in New York, because they didn't team up in their own show until 1883.
Here's Cody with Edwin Burgess at left.
I came across these images on Ebay and Cowan's auction site. They're obviously taken by the same photographer:
It is implied on Ebay that the images show Sicangu who were kidnapped by Carver to take part in the Wild West Show. My guess is that someone has mixed the idea of Carver forcing Lakota people to participate in his show with some of other non-Lakota images found in a lot that also contained photos of Carver's actual show. They also appear on Cowan's with admittedly ambiguously phrased text: site: www.cowanauctions.com/lot/charles-nordin-nebraska-photographer-glass-negative-collection-incl-wild-west-show-views-of-doc-carver-and-buffalo-bill-plus-american-indians-1961933
This one, however, is a different matter:
These are Lakota who worked with Carver, despite being labelled 'Sioux and Apache' on Ebay. Again, they also appear in the Cowan's lot, as part of the collection of Charles Nordin, who was born in Sweden in 1878 before emigrating to America where he became a photographer. However, this has to be one of the images he collected because he would only have been 12 when Carver had this show.
Men from this group also appear here:
This is one of several images of Carver's troupe taken in St Petersburg, Russia in 1890. Identifications courtesy of Dietmar and you can, of course, see some of these men in the image above: standing far left: William Garnett aka Billy Hunter; standing in the back, with bonnet: Painted Horse; sitting on left, with spear: He Crow; standing far right: Berney Kempton. Some men, like Painted Horse, worked for more than one Wild West Show through the years.
'Red Hatchet' is, of course, Painted Horse. I'm assuming he's next to Carver.
Big Bear
There's some anecdotal material here: static1.squarespace.com/static/5b5797f3297114bf53320277/t/5c4b6d6b7924e8386a2035f2/1548447112369/The+Kemptons_Chapter+One.pdf
The following are from the Wild America visit to Berlin:
All these photographs have 'Fielder' as the blindstamp.
One assumes there are more images out there. A lot more.