The Carter Report
Hidden for 90 Years
Cst. William Sharples Carter
CARTER Reg. No. 10186 was born in [Preston, Lancashire] England on June 25 , 1905, and joined the Force at Regina, May 8, 1932 (?). Carter served at Depot (Regina, Saskatchewan), "G" (Northwest Territories), "K" (Alberta) and "A" Divisions (Ottawa, Ontario), until taking his discharge January 11, 1947. He died September 17, 1991, at Regina, Saskatchewan, age 86.
Contable Carter was not a Mountie
The obituary above points out that William Carter joined the force in "May 1962" (sic), presumably meant to be May 1932. That's three months after the hunt. This confirms what Constable Bill White said in Mounties In Mukluks. "[Captain] Eames was the only Mountie there. The rest of them were all signalment and trappers." Carter would then have been an unofficial signalman who has a communication and intelligence role, relaying messages and maintaining communication lines. He would therefore not have been a Mountie actively involved in the hunt, or even a Mountie at all until three months later.
His Report was suppressed in favor of a doctored version of events and lost or destroyed. He didn't repeat his account until around 1980, over 30 years after his retirement.
The Carter Report
Update: The Carter Report appears to be a confidential document, and not just lost in the RCMP Johnson File at the LAC (Library and Archives Canada).
Read about the search for the Carter Report in the book
Webhunt: Hunting the Mad Trapper Online available on Amazon.
The "William Carter Report" dated as 1932 appears to actually be a second, rewritten Carter Report dated to c. 1981. and was put in the appendix of an obscure manuscript by Edward Zealley, and assembled from letters Carter wrote to Zealley and Dick North. It was to be published in the appendix of a book but the RCMP refused permission to publish and the appendix was buried in the Johnson File in the Archives of Canada for 44 years. Here are Zealley's letters to William Carter and RCMP Commissioner R H Simmonds with Carter's handwritten reply.
Here now for the first time online is The William Carter Report from the Appendix of Edward Zealley's hidden manuscript
