REALITY: The West was hardly empty, and settling it came at a high cost for all sides.

In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the latest in a series of Homestead Acts into law, offering 160 acres of “free land” to anyone who paid a small filing fee, made specified improvements and farmed the plot for five years. The result? Settlers claimed some 270 million acres of land, most of it west of the Mississippi.

In 1893, three years after a critical mass of those settlers prompted the U.S. Census Bureau to declare the end of the frontier era, historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his influential “frontier thesis.” Turner argued that successive waves of European-descended settlers—from fur traders to miners, cattlemen and those homesteading farmers—had civilized the untamed West, bearing out American exceptionalism.

Problem was, the West wasn’t empty territory; it had been inhabited for millennia. Thus, while the 1803 Louisiana Purchase nearly doubled the land area of the nascent country without a shot having been fired, that paper conquest was the catalyst to a century-long conflict against the tribal nations who inhabited that territory, a clash stained by broken treaties and forced removals. A dozen years of war (1836–48) with Mexico was the price for the similarly sweeping acquisition of Texas, California and the Southwest.

No one would contend this land had been free for the taking.

REALITY: Spaniards colonized the Southwest three centuries earlier.

In 1540, a half century after Christopher Columbus and his Spanish-sponsored expeditionary fleet arrived in the Western Hemisphere, rumored hordes of gold in Southwest Zuni villages prompted a large expedition led by conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. Venturing north from New Spain (present-day Mexico) across what today comprises parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, Coronado’s men found only scattered dusty pueblos. But the Spanish kept coming. They established the province of Nuevo México in 1598 and a dozen years later founded Santa Fé, the earliest permanent European settlement west of the Mississippi River.

The Spanish were also the first Europeans to settle the Far West. In 1769 (seven years before the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence) Gaspar de Portolá, governor of the newly established province of Las Californias, founded the Presidio of San Diego de Alcalá, the first European settlement in what today is the state of California. Portolá then led an expedition as far north as San Francisco Bay, laying the groundwork for a network of 21 missions intended to convert and pacify California’s Indians.

Spanish dominance in the West finally ended in 1821, with New Spain’s dissolution following the Mexican War of Independence. But Spain’s cultural legacy remains strong in the language, music and cuisine of the Southwest.

REALITY: Tribal people showed remarkable resilience, and warriors won many significant battles.

Undoubtably, the centuries-long tide of European settlement that rolled across the continent, displacing or killing off the descendants of the first Americans, had a devastating impact on tribal populations, with echoes to the present.

But Indians fought fiercely to defend their homelands and ways of life and sometimes scored significant victories. In 1680, the Pueblo Revolt drove the Spanish out of the Santa Fe area for a dozen years, likely sparing local tribal cultures from erasure. In 1791, a multitribal confederacy based in what today is Ohio handed the U.S. Army its worst-ever loss at the hands of Indians in what is recalled as St. Clair’s Defeat. Seven decades later on the Northern Plains, another alliance of tribal peoples successfully drove both settlers and soldiers from the Bozeman Trail and Powder River country during Red Cloud’s War.

The most celebrated Indian victory, of course, came at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, in which Lt. Colonel George Custer and five companies of the 7th U.S. Cavalry rashly charged headlong into a maelstrom of more than 2,000 allied warriors. By the time the smoke cleared, Custer and 268 of his troopers lay dead on the banks of the Montana Territory river the Indians knew as the Greasy Grass.

Accounts that burned up telegraph lines nationwide in the wake of “Custer’s Last Stand” painted it as a great tragedy, even a massacre. Yet, to the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho whose combined village the bluecoats had attacked, the battle had been a great victory—a fight for independence they had to win. It proved their high-water mark in the Indian wars, which ended in tragedy 14 years later at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

REALITY: Transient mining and railroad towns were indeed lawless, but many towns also implemented strict gun-control laws.

Watch any Western movie by directors like Sam Peckinpah or Quentin Tarantino, and you’d think there was a killing every hour in the Wild West. But do such depictions hold up to reality? Broadly speaking, no, though it depends on when and where one examines the record. Crime rates could be steep in boomtowns like Dodge City, Kansas, that sprang up as the railroads pushed westward, or rough-and-tumble mining towns like Bodie, California, where the murder rate per capita far exceeded those of far larger metropolitan areas back east. As a result, many frontier towns enacted strict gun ordinances. (Notorious Tombstone, Arizona, like many other towns, required visitors to surrender their firearms to a hotel or lawman upon arrival.)

Before the advent of badged sheriffs and marshals, the U.S. Army and renowned frontier forces like the Texas Rangers shouldered the job of quelling violence on the rapidly expanding frontier. And in especially lawless areas, citizens formed unofficial “vigilance committees.” While claiming to uphold the law, these groups dispensed their own rough version of justice, holding snap trials and, all too often, hanging offenders from the nearest lamppost. The most infamous, the Gold Rush-era 1856 Committee of Vigilance in San Francisco, boasted more than 6,000 members, hanged eight people and forced several corrupt city officials to resign.

REALITY: The profession was lonely, dirty—and perilous.

Western movies produced during Hollywood’s Golden Age could be light on the facts, particularly regarding the iconic American cowboy. Directors not only misrepresented cowboys as being almost entirely white (though a quarter of them were black and many others were Hispanic) but also filmed wildly inaccurate representations of the profession itself, with fantastical Indian fights and idyllic treks across picturesque landscapes.

In fact, cowboying was a lonely, dirty, smelly, low-paying and perilous profession that left many of its practitioners broken old men—if they were fortunate enough to live that long. “Death was never far from a cowboy,” writes Patrick Dearen in Saddling Up Anyway, the author’s no-holds-barred history of the vocation. But unlike in the movies, a cowboy’s demise was far more likely to come at the horns of stampeding steers than at the hands of hostile warriors.

Ironically, most cattle outfits frowned on and often fired cowhands for fighting, drinking or gambling, precisely the exploits that appear commonplace on-screen. Many aspects of a cowboy’s trademark accessories are also more fantasy than fact. Though most cowhands carried firearms on the trail (knives were more practical), they did so primarily to dispatch snakes, coyotes and other animals. Most cow towns, however, had prohibitions against carrying guns within city limits.

Perhaps more surprising, the era’s most popular hat wasn’t the iconic Stetson, but the derby (aka bowler), since Westerners, like their Eastern brethren, resided mostly in towns. For those riding the range, however, the wide-brimmed Stetson proved more popular—so much so that by the 1920s the John B. Stetson Co. was churning out some 2 million hats a day.

REALITY: Notable women excelled across all occupations on the frontier.

There’s no denying that job opportunities were limited for the courageous women who first ventured to the West. Certainly in the mining camps and so-called “Hell on Wheels” railhead towns, prostitution did a booming business. But often overlooked in narratives of the West are the cadre of enterprising females who defied the odds and made their marks in that male-dominated milieu.

Consider sharpshooter Annie Oakley, who rose to stardom as the “Little Sure Shot” of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and became a role model for millions of Victorian-era girls. Sue Robinson rose from an itinerant life as a child performer in the California gold camps to become a nationally acclaimed stage actress. Susan McSween could have withdrawn into mourning after the murder of husband amid the Lincoln County War. She instead worked hard to build up one of the biggest ranches in the region, earning the moniker “Cattle Queen of New Mexico.” Nellie Cashman lived the typical life of a hardscrabble Irish immigrant until 1898, when she joined other hopefuls to the diggings in Alaska and the Yukon. There she made a fortune mining for gold and selling supplies to other prospectors.

REALITY: Many of their exploits were fabricated by storytellers.

Romantic tales of Western adventurers have sparked the American imagination and sold more than their share of comic books, kid-sized six-shooters and coonskin caps. According to popular telling, for example, Buffalo Bill Cody made an epic Pony Express ride of 300-plus-miles as a teen (he didn’t) and in 1876 slew and scalped a Northern Cheyenne chief in retaliation for Custer’s Last Stand. (It was a warrior, not a chief, though Cody did later use the scalp as a gruesome prop during his Wild West shows.) Also according to legend, David Crockett killed a bear at age three (really?) and died in the valiant last stand at the Alamo. (He actually may have surrendered and been executed.) Other tales depicted Daniel Boone as a bold Indian slayer who swung on vines to elude capture. (He in fact had largely positive interactions with Indians.)

Such fabrications were driven by figures from the earliest American adventure novels, notably Natty Bumppo, the buckskinned protagonist of James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales.” Following in Cooper’s footsteps came dime novelist Ned Buntline (real name Edward Zane Carroll Judson), who in 1872 hired Buffalo Bill and fellow scouts Wild Bill Hickok and Texas Jack Omohundro to star in his stage melodrama “Scouts of the Prairie.” A Western in the live entertainment realm, the play introduced such clichés as the virtuous frontiersman, the savage Indian and the lovelorn Indian maiden to packed houses nationwide. The experience inspired Cody to launch his globetrotting Wild West arena production, featuring factual and made-up vignettes starring Buffalo Bill and his cast of soldiers, sharpshooters, stage drivers, cowboys and Indians.

Hollywood further distorted famed Westerners into cartoonish caricatures. None other than four-time Academy Award–winning director John Ford ridiculed such puffed-up portrayals with an unforgettable scene in his 1962 Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. A newspaper editor has learned that an acclaimed U.S. senator is not the hero everyone thinks. Refusing to publish the truth, the editor famously says, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”