True, but these were also fairly small towns where a killing would have been big news.

I've seen other accounts of how little ammunition was actually available at the time and how that alone made widespread violence pretty implausible.

Undisciplined

econ

The Not So Wild, Wild West (2021)

> In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, “nobody was killed in 1869 or 1870. In fact, nobody was killed until the advent of officers of the law, employed to prevent killings.” Only two towns, Ellsworth in 1873 and Dodge City in 1876, ever had 5 killings in any one year. Frank Prassel states in his book subtitled A Legacy of Law and Order, that “if any conclusion can be drawn from recent crime statistics, it must be that this last frontier left no significant heritage of offenses against the person, relative to other sections of the country.”

When I read a paragraph like this, I get kinda suspicious.  Perhaps instead of saying "no one was killed", it might be more accurate to say "no kills were recorded"