Famous Wild West Movies Ranked From Least To Most Accurate

Much like Tombstone, the acclaimed My Darling Clementine tells the story of Wyatt Earp and his band of brothers. They stop off in that town for one night, before discovering that one of the siblings has been killed. Earp believes the Clanton family to be guilty of his brother’s murder and becomes sheriff of the town to exact his revenge legally. The Clementine in the title refers to the lady that Earp falls for.

Although John Ford’s western earned acclaim, there are a number of historical inaccuracies in it. Firstly, Earp and his siblings never worked as cattle drivers. Secondly, James Earp wasn’t murdered in his teens in Tombstone, AZ — he actually lived to the ripe old age of 84. Doc Holliday was a dentist not a surgeon, and Old Man Clanton was not even alive at the time of the O.K Corral shootout. When beloved movies such as this one exist, it’s hardly surprising that so many myths about the Wild West are still believed. Here’s what we’re getting wrong about the era.

This movie is one of the crown jewels in the western genre. Sergio Leone’s epic tells the story of a rail baron named Morton looking to take control over a piece of land outside Flagstone that boasts a water source. But instead of threatening the land’s owner into giving it up, Morton’s men kill him and blame a known bandit. Eventually, Charles Bronson’s gunslinger comes into town with the murdered landowner’s wife.

Sadly, there are a number of goofs and factual errors in the flick. Firstly, in one scene Martha is heard crooning the popular song “Danny Boy.” But this ditty was only released in 1913, long after the film’s depicted era of the 1870s. Plus, Frank and his crew shouldn’t have gun belts and cartridges, which were not invented yet.

The Alamo is one of the most famous — or should we say infamous — battles in American history. So it should come as no surprise that it has been depicted in almost countless movies and TV shows. This effort starred Dennis Quaid as General Sam Houston, Jason Patric as Jim Bowie, and Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett. It didn’t receive great reviews, but the movie made a serious effort to get things historically right.

This included covering the contemporary politics of Mexico and its empresario system. Plus, the guns and cannons utilized are close to what was brandished in real life. Ditto the clothing of the Texians and the actual time of the battle. Even the aforementioned actors chosen for the key parts have nearly exact age matches with the characters they played!

Along with Dance With Wolves, Clint Eastwood’s magnificent Unforgiven helped revive the flagging western genre in the early 1990s. The movie tells the tale of an aging former bandit called William Munny. He rides into a small town in Wyoming with his crew to pick up a contract to kill some guilty cowboys. But he is challenged by English Bob and his company, plus the vigilante-hating sheriff Little Bill Daggett.

The movie was written by screenwriter David Webb Peoples. It is essentially a complete work of fiction. But the film does feel genuinely gritty, and it offers an eloquent meditation on Wild West violence. Still, it’s weird that almost no one has a beard. So, in conclusion, Unforgiven can be, ahem, forgiven.

The flick tells the story of the fabled Apache Indian Geronimo. He famously led an uprising against the United States Cavalry, when his tribe was pushed out to a small reservation to work as corn farmers. Unfortunately, the movie was something of a flop, earning mixed reviews and taking just $18.4m at the U.S. box office.

The film crew hired a Sioux activist called Sonny Skyhawk as a consultant, and every actor playing a Native American had to be vetted to ensure they had sufficient roots. Historic reenactment groups with their authentic uniforms and weapons were used as the sixth cavalry also. But Geronimo’s 1886 surrender to General Miles is curiously left out of the movie.

Quentin Tarantino’s bloody, revisionist western Django Unchained earned a lot of acclaim upon its 2012 release. The movie takes place two years before the Civil War broke out. And it follows Jamie Foxx’s titular Django, then a slave, who embarks on a mission to apprehend the brutal Brittle brothers alongside a German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz.

Django has been noted for its lack of historical accuracy. The Mandingo fight between two slaves is unlikely, and doubts exist that landowners engaged in this self-defeating practice. Plus, the Ku Klux Klan wasn’t founded until after the Civil War in 1858. Still, as Stephen Marchie of Esquire, amongst others, noted, the film is at least “one of the most overt attempts made to deal with the reality of slavery.”

The Kevin Costner-directed Dances With Wolves nearly cleaned up at the 1991 Oscars, earning seven gold statuettes from 12 nominations. The film told the story of Costner’s Civil War soldier John Dunbar, who fosters an unlikely kinship with a band of Lakota Indians, taking the name Dances With Wolves. But Unionist soldiers eventually arrive with plans to seize the Natives’ land.

Dances With Wolves was based on the novel of the same name by Michael Blake. Like the novel, the film was — for a Western — unusually sympathetic to the Native Americans. This was acknowledged by the Sioux Nation, who made Costner an honorary member. The story itself was mostly a fictionalized account of John Dunbar’s life, and the character Stands With A Fist was based on the Camanche kidnapped child Cynthia Anne Parker.  

There are precious few westerns that are as spellbinding as The Good, The Bad & The Ugly. The classic features standout performances from Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach, stunning cinematography, and an evocative Ennio Morricone score. The spaghetti western is set in the Southwest during the American Civil War and follows Eastwood’s mysterious stranger Joe and his unlikely partnership with a Mexican outlaw named Tuco.

The general gist of the story was quickly improvised with American film executives. So it was not based on real-life events. Nonetheless, Leone worked hard in researching the period of the film, traveling to America to pore over documents from the Library of Congress, as well as the photographs of period snapper Mathew Brady. Still, there was one major historical error in it: dynamite hadn’t been invented yet! 

Heaven’s Gate is infamous for being one of the most expensive flops in the history of cinema. But Michael Cimino’s lengthy western has earned something of a reappraisal in the years since its 1980 release. The movie tells the story of James Averill, who is sheriff of Wyoming’s Jackson County when a struggle between poor immigrants and rich cattle farmers ignites. 

The film is centered around a true-life event, namely the Johnson County War. The general gist of the story is fairly accurate. Still, Cimino used considerable artistic license. One major change he made was to turn the homesteaders into Eastern European immigrants. In real life, they were not foreign but poorer Americans. Furthermore, only two people were killed in the TA Ranch standoff, unlike in the movie.

Young Guns received a mixed reception from critics upon its release, but it proved more popular with audiences, taking $43.4m at the U.S. box office. The movie boasted an all-star cast of Emilio Estevez, his real-life brother Charlie Sheen, and Kiefer Sutherland amongst others. It told the tale of young a group of cowhands — including Estevez’s Billy the Kid — seeking vengeance for the murder of their mentor.

The Christopher Cain movie did receive praise for its likeness to real-life events. The historian Paul Hutton labeled it the most historically accurate of the numerous “Billy the Kid” movies. But it was not without its goofs. Take the singing of a song in a cantina that wouldn’t be released until 34 years after the movie’s events or the use of a Smith & Wesson gun that wasn’t actually made until 21 years later.

Arizona follows the travails of a hardy female pioneer named Phoebe Titus looking to set up a freight service in Tucson. She gets involved in a romance with a passing vagabond and then entwined with a menacing southerner out to destroy her business dreams. Directed by Wesley Ruggles and starring a young William Holden, the film received an indifferent reception from critics and the public upon its 1940 release. 

Rather than just filming anywhere in the West, Ruggles and his crew elected to shoot in southern Arizona, which is geographically authentic. Furthermore, the production oversaw what might be one of the most genuine western movie sets. The Tohono O’odham tribe — who had been creating adobe buildings out of mud bricks for centuries — were recruited to help build it. 

Another western from the old master John Ford, The Searchers is widely regarded as one of the best ever. Ford’s epic stars John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, a civil war soldier who goes back to Texas after the confederacy’s defeat. Things get worse for him when members of his brothers’ family go missing — including his young niece Debbie — believed to be kidnapped or abducted by Comanches. 

This was the first big movie to have a “making-of” filmed about it, at the request of director Ford. This behind-the-scenes look at the western shows how much effort went into selecting and preparing the sites, building props, and more. The Searchers has been noted for the realistically portrayed attitudes of whites and settlers towards the Natives, Ford keen to shine a light on this key element of American history.

Andrew Dominik’s flick divided audiences and critics upon its 2007 release. As its title suggests, the movie focuses on the outlaw Jesse James and his subsequent murder by Robert Ford. Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck portray the titular characters. But how accurate was the movie to real-life events?

The short answer is pretty accurate. Indeed, in a mixed review of the movie, The Guardian’s Alex von Tunzelmann noted how the “Brad Pitt vehicle scores high marks for historical accuracy and lovely cinematography, but gosh does it need to be so solemn?” He then goes on to praise how close it heeds to everything from the type of violence James undertook to his own fatal shooting. 

Little Big Man tells the story of 121-year old Jack Crabb, a Civil War veteran who, kind of like Forrest Gump, was there at many of the major events of his time. Dustin Hoffman’s Crabb takes an oral historian through his life story, including being rescued and brought up by the Cheyenne, to toiling as a snake-oil salesman and a gunslinger.

The movie was realistic in a way that was unusual for Westerns at the time. You see, it was one of the first that paid forensic detail to Native American life. Director Arthur Penn and his cinematographer Harry Stradling Jr. opted to shoot in real-life locations too, incorporating Little Big Horn and Indian reservations in Montana. 

Another classic western from the silent era, the movie — which was directed by James Cruze — was based on Emerson Hough’s book of the same name. That focused on the difficulties pioneers stumbled upon during their long and arduous treks to the American West. But how historically accurate was the film?

The Covered Wagon has been widely praised for its realism. And deservedly so, as the director and his team went to great lengths to achieve it, notably eschewing replica wagons for the real deal. Yes, Cruze even hired folk who had been pioneers and moved out west in them, and knew how to drive them properly! Plus, the silent acting in the film was more natural than many of its contemporaries.

Ang Lee’s Civil War era western follows the Missouri Bushwackers as they use guerrilla warfare to fight with Union Jayhawkers. They are looking to get revenge for a murder of one of their fathers, and the movie culminates in the infamous Quantrill raid in Lawrence, Kansas.

From a firearms and clothing point of view, the movie was very accurate. Indeed, True West Magazine makes the bold claim that “the authenticity of firearms and clothing has never been matched, much less surpassed, in films about the same subject.” Still, there is some artistic license used, such as confrontations between guerillas over the barbarity of Lawrence.

Shane is regarded by many as the greatest Western of all time. George Stevens’ movie follows the attempts of the titular ageing gunslinger to settle down in a miniscule Wyoming town and work on a farm. But Shane — who is memorably portrayed by Alan Ladd — gets pulled into a battle with the callous cattle baron Rufus, whilst falling for Joe Starrett’s wife Marian.

Acclaimed though it was for its moving story, Shane also gets high marks for its accurate depiction of the era. From the beginning, director Stevens and his trusted deputy Joe De Yong embarked on a period of research. The pair left no stone unturned in ensuring their movie was true to the era. This included everything from the garbs worn, the weapons and items used, and the buildings.

Released during Hollywood’s silent era, The Iron Horse tells the story of Pony Express rider Davy Brandon, who finds work in helping build the first transcontinental railroad. But Brandon has to fight off a bunch of saboteurs who try their best to stop him succeeding. John Ford’s western is widely viewed as an early classic in the genre, but how realistic was it?

Ford was a stickler for accuracy. He intercut remote Nevada backgrounds with the California sites used for filming. Plus he utilized a real locomotive from the bygone era that is shown chugging through the rocky mountains of Truckee. It’s worth noting, too, that in 1924 when the film was released, the Wild West was within living memory. Indeed, Ford actually knew Wyatt Earp and gleaned his knowledge.

The modern classic Tombstone follows the attempts of Wyatt Earp and his siblings to quit the gunslinger life and begin a business in the titular Arizona town. Of course, it doesn’t go to plan, and the brothers Earp have to fend off a merciless Cowboy gang and reestablish a semblance of order there. So, how close to the real story is it?

Well, what you might have assumed were Hollywood embellishments — like Bill Brosius failing to shoot Wyatt Earp from point-blank range — actually occurred in real life. Plus, the famous OK Corral shootout closely matches how courtroom proceedings said it’d turned out. Finally, remember Billy Claiborne? Well, he was portrayed by none other than Wyatt Earp’s actual fifth cousin. Cool!

The Big Trail is notable for being the first leading role of arguably the Western genre’s most famous son, John Wayne. The Duke plays a fur trapper called Breck Coleman, who works to safeguard pioneers traveling along the dangerous Oregon Trail, falling in love with a frontier woman on the way. But how accurate is the Raoul Walsh-directed movie compared to real life?

The answer is pretty painstakingly precise. Director Walsh demanded it in his attempts to accurately detail the American pioneers’ trek from the Mississippi to the Pacific Northwest. The trail was followed with shooting at 15 specific locations, from the Grand Canyon to the Grand Teton Pass, to Zion and Yellowstone National Parks. Around 1,800 cattle and 1,400 horses were used along with 20,000 extras. 

Cowboys have just got to be a U.S. invention, right? Totally wrong! The original cowboys – whom we should properly call vaqueros – long pre-date the cowboys of the American West. And they actually started riding the range south of the border in Mexico.

These Mexican cowboys date back to not long after Spain’s arrival in Central America in the 16th century. But even back then, the vaqueros built a reputation for their outstanding horsemanship and rope skills. From the 18th century, though, ranching spread north into modern-day Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. And the American cowboy was born. Yee-haw!

You know about the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn, right? You probably think it was a conflict between two determined leaders. They were General George Custer of the 7th Cavalry and Chief Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux, who led the Native Americans. Only... this isn’t really true.

For his part, Sitting Bull was the leader of the united Sioux and Cheyenne tribes who fought and killed Custer. But he wasn’t the military leader on the day of the Little Bighorn action. He was at the scene, but he stayed behind in the settlement that Custer had planned to attack. The man credited as the principal leader was actually Crazy Horse – an Oglala Lakota Sioux.

Most cowboys emphatically did not wear the wide-brimmed Stetson hat popularized by Hollywood. For one thing, they are totally impractical! As the cowboys rode across the plains, their Stetsons would’ve been blown away by the wind. And according to Ripley’s, it wasn’t widely worn until the late 19th century – after the cowboys’ heyday.

In fact, Wild West men found an entirely different headgear solution. Many actually wore a kind of bowler hat or derby. With their relatively narrow brims, those hats were much less inclined to blow off in the breeze. Just take a look at old photos from the Wild West days. You’ll see a wide variety of headgear – but very few classic Stetsons.

If you take your history from dime novels and movies, you could easily believe that the bad guys were robbing banks practically every day of the week. But this is another stereotype of the Wild West that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. And it’s hardly surprising if you think about it. If banks were being robbed so often, they’d soon go out of business altogether, right?

According to a 1992 paper written by Lynne Pierson and Larry Schweikart, bank robberies at gunpoint were actually a pretty rare event. The authors reviewed records from the 15 states most associated with the Wild West over a 41-year period from 1859. And they could only definitely identify a handful of bank robberies. Astonishingly, they found fewer than ten!

It’s certainly true that the Plains Indians did use pretty much all of the buffaloes they hunted and killed. There was the meat – obviously good to eat. The hides made splendid clothing and blankets, while the bones and horns could be carved into all manner of useful items from knives to combs. The fat, meanwhile, was turned into lubricants and cosmetics.

Yet there was one method of hunting that could be spectacularly wasteful. This was when Native Americans would drive buffalo towards a cliff edge until they toppled over to their deaths. And sometimes this could exterminate an entire herd. The resulting carnage killed far too many animals for the needs of the hunters – resulting on occasion in spectacular waste. It’s worth remembering, though, that it was white hunters who drove the bison to near-extinction by the end of the 19th century.

The 1881 Gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona territory, was the Wild West’s bloodiest encounter between the bad guys and the forces of law and order. But the truth is that only three men died with a further three wounded as a result of the 30-second gun battle that erupted at ranges as short as 10 feet.

Three dead and an equal number wounded is a shocking casualty list, but other Wild West shootouts were even worse. One such was the Gunfight at Hide Park in Newton, Kansas, which came a decade earlier than the OK Corral. This sprawling and anarchic battle saw five men killed and several others wounded. Or then there was the 1892 shootout when the Dalton Gang tried to rob two banks in Coffeyville, Kansas. The townsfolk shot dead four of the group while four of Coffeyville citizens also died.

Watching Hollywood movies and TV shows from the 20th century, you could be forgiven for thinking that all cowboys were white men. Though like so many myths about the Old West, this was also totally untrue. After all, people who did not have white skin were perfectly capable of riding horses, herding cattle and eating baked beans around a camp fire.

Smithsonianmag.com points out that some 25 percent of cowboys were actually black. Texas ranches in particular had many African-American hands. After the Civil War, there was a shortage of white cowboys in the state. Former slaves had now been emancipated, and they had the requisite skills to take the vacant jobs as free men.

According to Wild West legends, women took only subordinate domestic roles – baking delicious apple pies and keeping their menfolk’s duds neatly laundered. It’s baloney of course. Examples of women who shattered the stereotypes are legion. Annie Oakley, for instance, was an excellent shot and made a living with this skill by touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

Another who can hardly be described as a shrinking violet was Pearl Hart. Starting off with petty crime in Arizona, Hart later teamed up with one Joe Boot and hatched a plot to hold up a stagecoach in 1899. After the robbery, the two were captured but Hart contrived to escape. Apprehended again, the outlaw was sentenced to five years in jail. Though she fell pregnant after a year and was released. And how Hart managed a pregnancy while imprisoned remains a mystery to this day.

It’s undoubtedly true that many Native Americans opposed white settlers and the U.S. government by force of arms – particularly when they saw their tribal lands threatened. But there were also many indigenous people who worked with the white man. These scouts helped to guide and advise the army as it fought hostile Native Americans.

In 1866 the U.S. government agreed that the army should establish a force of Native Americans with a strength of up to 1,000 men, according to the latter’s official website. These individuals were to be both scouts and fighters. General George Crook made extensive use of them during his campaign against the Chiricahua Apaches – led by their chief Cochise. In fact, his scouts were largely from rival Apache groups: the San Carlos and White Mountain bands.

The story goes that someone insulted 12-year-old Henry McCarty’s mother so he shot the ill-mannered fellow dead. Then he ran away to become Billy the Kid. But did it actually happen? Well, no: his first known crime came when he was 15 or 16 in 1875. Far from a brutal murder, this was actually the theft of some clothes from a laundry. He was arrested for this misdemeanor but escaped.

As far as we know, McCarty first killed a man in August 1877 at Fort Grant in Arizona when he would have been 17 or 18. His unfortunate victim was a blacksmith called Frank “Windy” Cahill. He had apparently made the mistake of calling McCarty a pimp. A brawl ensued and the blacksmith, much bigger than the teenager, wrestled him to the ground. Though the Kid pulled his gun and shot Cahill, who subsequently died the next day.

It’s an archetypal scene from dozens of Westerns: tumbleweed rolling across the barren landscape of the southwestern deserts of the U.S. This thistle, you’d assume, is as American as apple pie. So, it comes as something of a shock to learn that the strange plant is actually not a native of the U.S. – it is in fact an alien invasive species.

Tumbleweed is known as Russian Thistle, and it comes from southeastern Russia and the west of Siberia. The Center for Invasive Research notes that it arrived in South Dakota in a consignment of flax seed in 1873. Within two decades it had spread across 16 Western states and into Canada. Now, the pesky invader is present in some 100 million acres of the western U.S.

Wyatt Earp’s image is that of an upstanding lawman who fought the forces of evil during the Wild West era. His reputation was cemented by the part he played in the 1881 Gunfight at the OK Corral when he and his compadres vanquished the evil Clanton and McLaury gang and their friends. Later, two of Earp’s brothers were shot in what many believed to be revenge. Virgil was badly wounded, while Morgan was killed.

While it’s true that Earp was a lawman in 1881 – and afterwards became a deputy U.S. marshal – he had not always been on the right side of the law. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, ten years earlier he was arrested for horse stealing but absconded before trial. While living in Peoria, Illinois, he also had various legal scrapes. These centered on his involvement with brothels – something that continued when he moved on to Wichita, Kansas in 1874.

Just like Robin Hood before him, legend has it that the outlaw Jesse James robbed from the rich to give to the poor. But is this true? Or was he actually a common or garden thief who stole for his own benefit? Sadly for the romantics among us, there seems little doubt that the latter is true. That he – along with brother Frank and various others – robbed banks in the 1860s is certainly the case.

The Robin Hood reputation apparently came when James and his gang started to hold up and rob trains. It’s said that they only took the money from safes – leaving the passengers’ wallets and purses intact. But that’s not quite the same as distributing alms to the impoverished. And nothing suggests that James ever did that! Then there was the fact that the ruthless gang killed some 15 people during their crime sprees, according to The Guardian.

It might be the best known of all gold rushes, but the one that happened in California in 1849 actually was not the first in America. In 1799 a 12-year-old boy called Conrad Reed stumbled across a large rock with a strange yellow tint in Cabarrus County, North Carolina. He’d no idea what it was, and neither did his father John. So, according to legend, they used it as a door stop!

One day, somebody with the know-how visited the Reeds and recognized a 17-pound gold nugget when he saw one. The North Carolina Gold Rush soon got under way – half a century before the Californian one. In fact, the state was America’s largest producer of gold in the country up until the California finds.

The 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn between Native Americans and a unit of the U.S. Army is famous as Custer’s Last Stand. General George Custer was leading his men on a punitive expedition against people of the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes. But Native American warriors surrounded Custer and his men – killing everyone under the general’s command. Except what actually happened was that the majority of Custer’s 7th Cavalry regiment escaped with their lives.

As he approached Little Big Horn, Custer had more than 600 men under his command. Though he divided his force into three battalions before the main engagement and they were to attack separately. Two of them retreated and joined forces on a hill top – holding out against the Native Americans despite losing 30 men. By contrast, Custer and his battalion of about 210 troops were isolated on a different crest and massacred to the last man. Most of the cavalrymen from the other two groups survived.

The idea that two of the best-known figures from the days of the Wild West had a child together has an obvious appeal. And if those two were the notorious Calamity Jane – real name Martha Cannary – and Wild Bill Hickock then the yellow press of the time would have had an absolute field day. But sadly, the two were never star-struck lovers and they definitely didn’t have any offspring.

The myth arose because a woman called Mrs. Jean Hickok McCormick made the public claim in 1941 that she was the child of Hickok and Cannary. She produced various artifacts and what she claimed was Calamity Jane’s diary to back up her assertion. But many researchers were skeptical to say the least. In 2001 Deadwood Magazine quoted historian J. Leonard Jennewein’s view that Mrs. McCormick’s tale was “a hoax from start to finish.”

Geronimo was an Apache chief who defied the might of the U.S. government and its army. Many attempts to capture and resettle him by force on an approved reservation failed. But eventually, the inevitable happened. With almost a quarter of the standing military on his heels, Geronimo was left with little alternative but to surrender in 1886. And he was the last important Native American chief to do so.

Geronimo then spent the final 20 years of his life as a prisoner in various U.S. Army posts. His final billet was at Fort Sill – located in what is today Oklahoma. After 14 years here Geronimo died in 1909. Ever since, stories about the precise circumstances of his death have circulated. It’s been claimed that he died trying to escape or that he drowned. But the truth seems to be that he fell from his horse after a few drinks, according to The Olkahoman. Lying in a field in the rain overnight caused a bout of pneumonia and he passed away in the Fort Sill hospital.

Anyone who’s seen the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid knows that the two outlaws died in a hail of bullets in Bolivia. This goes to show, though, that you can’t always trust Hollywood. The truth about how the pair died is actually far from certain. We do know that a mining company employee called Carlos Pero was robbed by two bandits described as “Yankees” in southern Bolivia in 1908.

Now, Butch and Sundance had fled from the U.S. in 1901 and disappeared from sight. So when Bolivian soldiers cornered those two American bandits a few days after Pero had been robbed, it was easy enough to assume they were the notorious duo. And the two men were indeed killed in a shootout. But no photographic evidence exists to prove who the individuals were. Sightings were reported for years afterwards and some relatives claimed they were still alive. Incredibly, it remains an unsolved mystery to this day.

Not long after people unknown murdered Belle Starr in 1889, The New York Times declared that the lady known as the “Bandit Queen” was “the most desperate woman that ever figured on the borders.” But did Myra Maybelle Shirley Starr really merit this reputation? In his 2015 book Belle Starr and Her Times: The Literature, the Facts, and the Legends, Glenn Shirley says not.

Shirley wrote, “[Starr] had been elevated to a seat of immortal glory as a sex-crazed hellion with the morals of an alley cat.” And, he added, she’d been accused of everything from blackmail to murder and even incest. Yet, as the writer pointed out, “All this [was] despite the lack of a contemporary account or court record to show that she ever held up a train, bank or stagecoach or killed anybody.”

If all the information you had about Wild West cowboys came from popular media, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they pulled out their six-shooters and blasted away on an almost daily basis. But you’d be completely wrong. Cowboys did of course have firearms, but they weren’t drawing them on each other willy nilly.

In fact, plenty of Old West cities had local laws prohibiting the carrying of guns. Many towns made notorious by the mythology of the Old West had such restrictions – including Tombstone, Deadwood and Dodge City. And according to author Phillip Meyer in a piece he wrote for Esquire magazine in 2013, “More cowboys were killed by falls and lightning than by bullets.”