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Atha Carter

Agent Atha Carter of the USTD-Reno

NEVADA STATE JOURNAL

December 24, 1922

A. “NICK” CARTER DIES AS RESULT OF GUN WOUNDS

Shot in Skirmish at Illicit Still New Palisade:

End Comes as a Shock

Prohibition Officer Atha (“Nick”) Carter, shot in the performance of his duty while attempting to arrest two moonshiners at Palisade last Tuesday, died shortly after 2 this morning.

Help up by sheer grit and a powerful constitution, Carter withstood the snow for eight hours with a shattered leg, and until yesterday Dr. George McKenzie, in charge at St. Mary’s hospital, believed that he had a chance to pull through.

Late yesterday came the turning point. His usual optimistic attitude maintained constantly since he was shot that “no bootlegger can kill me,” changed…

Wounded in Raid

…Carter received his wound when, in company with Officer Peter E. Dubois, he attempted to take into custody the operators of a still on the Raine ranch near Palisade, last Tuesday near midnight.

After listening to the instructions of the apparent leader to a second man to shoot on the first sight of any one, the two officers ordered the moonshiners to throw up their hands. The man on the house fired in the direction of the voices, and at the second shot Carter was hit. A volley of shots from the two officers sent the moonshiners fleeing and the horse of one was killed. Harry Webb, also in the officers’ party, who drove the federal agents to the still saw Carter fall and, believing that both men would be killed, fled in the automobile.

As a result Carter was without medical aid until Dubois walked to Webb’s cabin, four miles away from the Raine ranch, and finding no one at home walked into Palisade. Ten hours elapsed before Dr. Rowe of Carlin reached him. Carter’s face and hands were frostbitten from the long wait in the snow.

Federal Officers who reached the Raine ranch a day after the shooting found Raine and Brife on horseback near the scene of the shooting and arrested then in connection with the affair…

Still Destroyed

Prohibition Officer Percy Nash and Deputy United States Marshal Lyman Fulton, who conducted an investigation after the prisoner were taken to Reno, declared that the still had been destroyed and evidence thrown into the river; that pigs had been driven over the spot where the shooting occurred in order to obliterate the tracks and that all shells had been picked up and the carcass of the dead horse cut upon so that pigs might devour it.

 

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