Westerns and video games have made draws a common occurrence in the life of a cowboy but how common were they for real? And were they ever really done in the middle of the street in broad daylight?
Mark Twain's Roughing It (1872) deals with his Nevada sojourn of 1861-1864. He describes gunfights, which consisted of people quickly drawing guns and shooting at one another in saloons or in chance encounters on the streets. These were relatively rare, and they were not stylized as depicted in Westerns. They were quick and sudden. They were also relatively rare. Generally the object was to shoot an opponent before he thought of pulling out a pistol. It was not a matter of standing there opposing one another in a fair fight. This sort of violence is also the topic of newspaper coverage of the period.
Twain also describes journalists engaging in formal duals. These were extremely rare, in part because they were illegal (which was the case for most of the nation by the time of the Western settlement). These were the closest thing to what is depicted in Westerns, but because they were illegal, they were held in remote locations away from law enforcement. Twain describes two of these duals. In one, his editor shot his opponent in the knee, leaving him with a permanent limp. The two became good friends for life. In the other, Twain was supposedly involved (it may be fictionalized). His companion, his "second," shot a bird in flight as his opponent and his second were arriving. Twain's second claimed Twain had taken the shot. Twain's opponent thought better of the dual and left. So much for a Western cliché.
The classic Western gun battle was in Tombstone at the OK Corral, but this was not a stylized fair fight of a Western film or TV program. This was two groups of people trying to shoot as quickly and as often as possible.
I should add - and should have mentioned with my previous comment - that the formal duals Twain describes were apparently (based on reading primary sources including Twain) regarded as the sort of thing only wimpy nerds would engage in. They might as well have been wearing ruffled shirts like Hamilton and Burr. These sorts of duals were not only illegal, they were becoming anachronisms by the 1860s in the West.