20 Myths About The Wild West We’ve All Been Confusing As Facts

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.”

Yes, Hollywood and TV have shaped our perceptions of the Wild West. But these remarkable, and rarely seen, images and facts reveal just how wild the West really was. Here, gold hunters – on their way to California from the east – gave Death Valley its name in 1849. Back then, the Californian Gold Rush was at its height, and prospectors were willing to cross landscapes as deadly and barren as this to make their fortunes.

This gun-wielding lady is Rose Dunn or, to those who feared her, “Rose of Cimarron.” Born in Oklahoma, Dunn fell in love with outlaw George “Bittercreek” Newcomb in 1893 when she was just 14 or 15. Just two years later, however, Newcomb was shot dead. And it was Dunn’s two bounty-hunter brothers who did it.

There were criminal gangs aplenty in the Wild West, but what set the Rufus Buck Gang apart was its members’ racial profiles: they were a mix of African American and Creek Indian. And their operations mainly involved holding up stores and ranches in Arkansas and Oklahoma, with their offences later resulting in their hangings.

Formed in 1823 to defend Texas after the Mexican War of Independence, the Texas Rangers became the most iconic law enforcers in the Wild West. They were synonymous with violence. In fact, between 1858 and 1901 30 members suffered bloody deaths. The rangers did, however, kill and capture many high-profile outlaws – including bank robber Sam Bass.

This poignant image shows a group of Navajo people in 1873, somewhere near Fort Defiance, New Mexico. It was taken after the “Long Walk” of 1864, and photographer Timothy H. O’Sullivan has done an impressive job of recording the remnants of a once proud people who were, sadly, forcibly dispossessed of their ancestral lands.

Resplendent on his white horse and in his feathered headdress, Quanah Parker looks every inch the Comanche chief. And while his attire was striking, Parker was, first and foremost, a warrior. Indeed, he became a war chief at a remarkably young age after becoming known as an aggressive fighter.

She wasn’t your average Wild West woman, Olive Oatman – as evidenced by the tattoo beneath her mouth. The Mohave tribe gave it to her after they’d bought Oatman and her sister, Mary Ann, from the Native Americans who’d kidnapped them. The symbolism, Oatman believed, marked her as a slave.

Cherokee statesman Ned Christie is best remembered for clashes with U.S. lawmen in what became known as Ned Christie’s War. Events started in 1887, when Christie was accused, perhaps wrongly, of killing a U.S. Marshal. Then, two years later, law-enforcement officers burnt his house down – though Christie escaped. In 1892, however, he was eventually killed.

This 1872 image shows a group of slightly surly-looking Paiute people. Still, their expressions can be forgiven, given the ordeals they suffered in the Paiute War. In fact, it’s not known exactly how many Paiute people died in the 1860 conflict, which was fought against U.S. settlers alongside other tribes.

It wasn’t easy for Timothy H. O’Sullivan to document the Wild West; not only were terrains hostile, but camera technology was also in its infancy. And one of his most challenging assignments was a survey of the land west of the 100th meridian. In fact, this involved four mules hauling his darkroom wagon through Nevada’s Carson Sink.

Cowboys had to defend their valuable stock from attacks by everything from grizzly bears and coyotes to mountain lions. In this 1887 photograph taken in Wyoming, five cowboys display a – presumably hungry – gray wolf that they’ve managed to rope. Cattle’s certainly off the menu for this unfortunate canine.

Here, a group of Navajo people are seen traversing Arizona’s notorious Canyon de Chelly. The Navajos, sadly, were the victims of one of the worst atrocities against Native Americans. Yes, in 1864 the U.S. government forced 9,000 Navajos to march 300 miles to Bosque Redondo, New Mexico – a resettlement later dubbed the “Long Walk.” Naturally, many later succumbed to disease, food shortages and conflict with other relocated tribes.

This image, which was probably taken in 1900, turned up in a Californian antiques store in Randsburg, California. It seemingly shows a particularly precarious pass in the Sierra Nevada, which is being traversed by important-looking passengers. Armed escorts accompanied them, after all, so they must have had some power or wealth.

“The Cow Boy,” by photographer and former miner John C. H. Grabill, is among the most accurate depictions of a Wild West cowboy there is – and this one, it seems, was happy to pose for the camera. Such figures started appearing as early as the 1820s, when English speakers began arriving in Texas.

Charley Nebo arrived in the U.S. from Canada in 1861. And after fighting on the Union side in the Civil War, he worked as a cowboy in New Mexico, where one of his friends was none other than Billy the Kid. No one messed with Nebo. In fact, once he shot a man dead for killing a Mexican boy’s dog.

William T. Anderson earned his “Bloody Bill” nickname for his actions during the Civil War. And in 1864 he led a Confederate guerrilla band in capturing a train in Centralia, Missouri. Some 24 Union soldiers were subsequently killed in what was an act of revenge for one of his sisters dying in Union custody.

Belle Starr was a Wild West rarity; she was, after all, a female outlaw. In 1864 her family moved to Texas, and it was there that Starr mixed with the likes of Jesse James. In 1880 she married Cherokee Sam Starr and became involved in rustling, bootlegging and horse stealing. She spent some time in jail, and she was shot and killed in 1889.

Billy the Kid – real name Henry McCarty – launched his criminal career with a relatively modest heist of clothing from a Chinese laundry in 1875. But Billy quickly began to gun men down and, depending on whom you believe, eventually killed up to 21 people. That’s also the number of years he lived, as he soon met his own violent death at the hands of Sheriff Pat Garret. Adding to the mystique of this notorious outlaw is the fact that there are only two confirmed pictures of him.

The life of a cowboy was undeniably tough, despite the romance that surrounds their escapades. In fact, they’d often be out on the range for weeks at a time, especially on long cattle drives. And that meant precious little opportunity to wash – until, that is, they stumbled upon a creek.

Spotted Elk, also known as Big Foot, was a chief within the Lakota Sioux tribe. And he met his end at the Wounded Knee Massacre in December 1890, during which Union officers brutally killed him and 152 others – including many unarmed women and children.

It’s plain to see that this 1911 photograph was a stage-managed affair. In reality, of course, the fear of crossing bandits or hostile Native Americans while traveling via stagecoach was exaggerated in popular literature. Attacks certainly did happen sometimes, mind you. One attack on two San Antonio to El Paso mail coaches, for example, came in 1854. On that occasion, 15 Texans fought off around 50 Mescalero Apaches, killing three of them at the cost of two wounded.

When thinking of Jesse James, you’d almost certainly picture a dangerous outlaw who would stop at nothing in pursuit of his crimes. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But it seems that there was actually another side to James. Photographed here in the early 1880s are the two children, Jesse Jr. and Mary, he had with his wife, Zerelda.

One of the most famous of the 19th-century Apaches, Geronimo was an important leader of his people. Seen on the far right of this photo, he was born in 1829 as a member of the Bedonkohe. Geronimo actually teamed up with other Apache clans to lead many raids in northwest Mexico and southwest America. He finally surrendered to the U.S. Army in 1886 and lived on until 1909.

Here we see an unidentified member of the Shoshone people dating from around 1900. The Shoshone were in bitter and often deadly conflict with settlers and U.S. soldiers during the 19th century. In one grim episode in 1863, for instance, U.S. soldiers attacked a camp in what is now part of Idaho. The event is known as the Bear River Massacre, and it saw some 410 Shoshone men, women and children killed.

Born in Canada around 1871, Pearl Hart gained a reputation as a dangerous Wild West outlaw. She was, in fact, from a prosperous family and had received a good education. But she rebelled against respectability and, after various criminal enterprises, took part in what may have been the last-ever stagecoach hold-up in Arizona in 1899. She was soon apprehended and sentenced to five years in prison. Some say that she later died in 1955, yet others believe she lived until 1960.

This is U.S. military commander George Armstrong Custer in what is said to be his very last photograph. Not long after this was taken, you see, he died at the Battle of Little Big Horn, which is often known as Custer’s Last Stand. In this 1876 battle, the Northern Cheyenne, Lakota and Arapaho peoples defeated the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment. And in addition to Custer, 267 other cavalry men died in the battle, including two of his own brothers.

This photo shows four members of the infamous Younger family: brothers Bob, James and Cole, and their sister Retta. The Younger brothers were actually active in the outlaw gang that counted Jesse James and his brother Frank as members. The three brothers in the picture were later captured after a bank robbery and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1876. Another brother, John, was shot in 1874.

It was July 10, 1864, when a 16-year-old Jesse James went into a photographic studio in Platte, Missouri. Why he chose that particular day to have this photo taken, we don’t know. But with his three pistols and stony expression, James comes across an image-conscious young man. It would be another 18 years before James was killed by an associate called Robert Ford, who shot him in the back of the head.

Here we have a 1901 group shot of one of the Wild West’s most famous outlaw gangs, the Wild Bunch. Third from the left is Harry Longabaugh, better known as the Sundance Kid. On the far right is Robert LeRoy Parker, immortalized under the name of Butch Cassidy. Eventually, all the gang members met violent deaths.

This sprawling line of wagons took American immigrants across the prairies and mountains to the west throughout the 19th century. Interestingly, wagon trains are perhaps among the most powerful representations of the creation of modern-day America due to their central role in Old West migration. As the 19th century unfolded, however, they were gradually replaced by the railroads.

This old-timer is panning for gold somewhere in California in 1850. That makes it two years since the beginning of the famous California gold rush, which started after James W. Marshall found deposits at Coloma in California. Some 300,000 people subsequently flooded into the state from other parts of America and around the world.

Frontier towns are an important element of the Wild West story and how it’s been depicted in popular media. They were typically timber-built, rough-and-ready places with one main street. A frontier town might have had a saloon, stables and a hotel too. The town in this 1903 photo is Tonapah, Nevada, which sprung up as the result of a silver find in around 1900.

Another central plank of the Wild West tale is the saloon bar. In these drinking dens, you might have found men gambling, like those in the picture here. The men captured are playing a card game called Faro in the Orient Saloon in Bisbee, Arizona.

Leadville in Colorado is another town that experienced an unprecedented boom on the back of a silver find. Prospectors here found silver in 1877. And over the following three years, the population increased a hundred times in size to 40,000 – a staggering spike.

Laura Bullion, a natty dresser judging from this 1893 mugshot, was a member of the Wild Bunch outlaw gang. Born in 1876, she is said to have had a romance with fellow outlaw Bill “The Tall Texan” Kilpatrick. But in any case, Bullion received a five-year jail sentence for a train robbery in 1901 and thereafter led an apparently quiet life until her death in 1961.

If this 1892 arrest portrait is anything to go by, Marion Columbus Hedgepeth had a well-developed taste for fancy neckwear. Still, born in 1856 in Prairie Home, Missouri, Hedgepeth was on the wrong side of the law at 20 years of age after robbing trains and killing people in both Wyoming and Colorado. And following a jail stretch in the 1880s, Hedgepeth continued his criminal career. He also served further prison sentences until a police officer shot and killed him in 1909 during an attempted saloon robbery.

This rather whimsical image is evidence that not all the inhabitants of the Wild West were cold-eyed killers. Some of them, it seems, had a sense of humor – and possibly even a touch of gender fluidity. After all, this cowboy’s girlfriend dresses him in her bonnet, while she dons his cowboy hat. This is surely evidence that the Wild West wasn’t all shoot-outs and train robberies.

Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th president of the U.S., serving two terms from 1901 to 1909. But earlier in his life, he’d entertained the idea of living as a cowboy. In fact, he acted on this for a time in the 1880s when he lived as a simple cowboy on his Elkhorn Ranch in North Dakota. But it seems that the call of politics was too strong, and the rest is history.

Calamity Jane was born Martha Jane Canary in 1852 in Princeton, Missouri. Her father, Robert, was a habitual gambler, and her mother was a prostitute. Both parents died young too, so it can hardly have been an easy childhood. Jane nevertheless went on to become a notably fearless fighter of Native Americans, and that was how she earned her nickname. She also appeared in the 1890s in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Calamity Jane died in 1903.

Perhaps the most famous frontier town was Tombstone, Arizona. Its fame rests on the fact that it was the scene of the 1881 shootout at the O.K. Corral. During this deadly encounter, the law-enforcing Earp brothers and their buddy Doc Holliday fought a blood-soaked battle with criminal group the Cowboys. In the course of the firefight, three outlaws were shot dead.