The American Old West was a lawless frontier of constant gunfights, where every man wore a six-shooter, saloons emptied into the street for high-noon duels, and bodies piled up daily. Westerns built it into the global imagination: violence as a way of life.
Most frontier towns were comparatively quiet, and several were stricter about guns than modern America. Cattle towns like Dodge City and Tombstone often required visitors to check their firearms with the sheriff on arrival, the opposite of the everyone-armed fantasy. Historians who have counted the bodies find homicide rates that were sometimes high relative to population but produced only a handful of killings a year in any given town, not daily shootouts. The legendary gunfight at the O.K. Corral lasted about thirty seconds and was famous precisely because such events were rare. The wall-to-wall violence came from dime novels, Wild West shows, and later Hollywood, which needed drama and sold a lot of it. The real West had more fence-mending and boredom than quick-draws. The myth is more fun, which is exactly why it stuck.