23 American History Questions Most Americans Get Wrong

21. What was the Wild West really like?

Correct: Pretty tame, actually
Incorrect: Violent and lawless

To take it from John Wayne and Butch Cassidy, the Old West was a volatile free-for-all—just a region-wide, decades-long brawl. However, that’s just a myth. Peter J. Hill, a senior fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, succinctly put it: “The violence of the [Wild] West is largely a myth.” Corral, perhaps the most celebrated shootout of the entire period, ended in a relatively modest body count of three.