It is high noon, two men on Main Street are ready for a quick draw shootout.  Sorry, but that never happened except for maybe a coupe of unrecorded incidents.  In fact, if it did happen, it was likely that the man who drew and fired first was the one who died. 

According to Wyatt Earp (pictured above), the fighter who survived in any gunfight was the one who took his gun out, took a moment to aim and then fired.  He was the Deputy Sheriff of Dodge City when this picture was taken in 1876. Some believe that Wyatt Earp died in a shootout.  This story is a complete fabrication, in fact, he lived to be a ripe old age of eighty.

The body count of the Old West was greatly inflated thanks to the dime novels that first introduced Western badmen and heros to the American public.  Of course Hollywood picked up where they left off. 

Billy the Kid (pictured in this tintype) was thought to have killed twenty one men before he was twenty one years old.  He was one of the mainstays in old dime novels, which created an image of a larger than life gunslinger.  However, the count was actually three or four at the most.

Bat Masterson was a Deputy Sheriff in Dodge City at the same time as Wyatt Earp.  He also was the fodder of the dime novels, who created for him a reputation as an invincible lawman.  However, Bat Masterson actually only killed three men in shootouts.  One story has it that Bat was so annoyed by a collector who was trying to buy his gun that he went to a pawn shop and bought an old Colt then carved twenty two notches in the handle as a joke. 

It was a popular belief that Buffalo Bill Cody was wounded one hundred and thirty seven times while fighting Indians.  According to a very reliable source, his wife, he was actually only ever injured once because of Indians.  This story may have been perpetuated by Bill Cody himself in order to make himself and his Wild West Show more marketable.  Pictured below is one of his adveritsements that were distributed before his shows in order to draw bigger crowds.

As for the general day to day violence that was thought to occur in frontier towns, nothing could be further from the truth.  According to the old western movies and the dime novels that went before them, you could expect a shootout to occur every couple of days.  As it turns out, the real Dodge City had five shooting deaths in 1878, which was its most violent year.

As it turns out, most of the violence that did occur in the old west was attributed to indians.  There was a tremendous amount of unrest and fighting due to the fact that settlers were infringing upon hunting grounds and territiory that had been defined between the different Indian Nations or tribes.  The settlers even disrespected their sacred ground.  One example is the Garden Of The Gods in Colorado.  It was not until just the last ten years that all the construction was finally removed from this sacred spot.