10 Popular History Myths (You Probably Believe)

The myth of the lawless, wild frontier has been mythologized across virtually every artistic medium. Whether it's movies like Tombstone or the Dollars trilogy, or video games like the Red Dead series, the Western mythos has been solidified in the popular imagination.

The reality was much less romantic, and much less violent. For example, the notoriously "lawless" town of Dodge City, Kansas, averaged only 1.7 murders a year between 1876 and 1888. Furthermore, there were only about eight recorded bank heists in the entirety of the American West from 1859 to 1900.

Then there's the iconic duel. Two rough-and-tumble gunslingers take their places in a dusty street, so many paces from one another. They narrow their eyes, draw their revolvers, and fire. One man drops to the dirt, while the other spins his revolver and slips it back into its holster. What of that popular Western trope? It only happened once or twice, at least that historians know of. Even the term "gunslinger" isn't accurate. That term didn't come into the popular lexicon until the 1920s. Before then, they were called 'shootists' or 'pistoleros.'

The Wild West is a carefully constructed myth, one that we still cherish and refuse to let die.