Prove it...
That's what this is about - provenance, not inference or wishful thinking a'la C&WAS' stages.
Look at the reality of the Old West - and not what one 'thinks' may have happened, based upon modern-day experiences.
That's the idea behind the 'Woulda If They Coulda' posse - and those guys all believe that what they see in the old 'John Ford Reference Library' is real, and not cooked up to entertain with derring-do and dire situations.
The cowboy's primary job was that of a drover - not as a wanna-be gunman - loaded for bear, and armed to the teeth - the job was moving cattle.
That job was performed by young men - boys, in many cases - and with young men, testosterone is in huge supply - meaning that they'll fight at the drop of a hat over imagined slights.
Ranchers didn't want that - they wanted their cattle to get to a railhead with all hands - so for most outfits, the sidearms were stowed with their soogans and warbags, back in one of the wagons - taken out when the situation meant they were actually needed and not when emotions ran high.
The rest of the populace was invested in building a better life than what they'd had before the Civil War - if they carried - they carried smaller weapons that were more easily concealed.
Trail towns turned into 'towns' pretty quickly, and as they 'civilized' themselves and built churches and schools, they enacted laws that forbade carrying a sidearm in certain sectors of the town - and they actually fined for infractions, because no one wanted to raise a family amid the nascent violence that liquor and ready access to weapons brings.
Then, as now - folks mostly just want to be left alone to raise families and hopefully prosper as part of a community.
Read the Time-Life series 'The Old West' - it'll give a good overview of the 'real' Old West, and not the 'reel' version - and read those diaries and accounts of folks that weren't lawmen (who sometimes had a legitimate reason to be heavily armed), but cattlemen.
'Cowboys' were a very small part of the panoply of folks who settled the West - albeit the most 'romantic' part - but there was more to the American frontier than most are aware.
Vaya,
Scouts Out!