It’s said that truth is stranger than fiction. What gets left out is that it’s often a whole lot more disappointing. Take the Wild West: we like to think we have a pretty good idea of what the frontier was like—punching cows and shooting cheats in places with names like Drunkman’s Creek and Dead Squaw’s Buttocks. But it turns out the reality of cowboy life was way less romantic and way more prone to stuff like STDs. It seems our mental picture of the Old West is missing important little details like these: