Near the movie's beginning, Maverick asks the young man wearing the bowler hat at the poker table, who claims to be a gunfighter, what his name is. He answers, "Johnny Hardin," and Maverick fumbles his chips pretending to be scared, but then clowns around pointing his own gun at the youth. The real John Wesley Hardin was a notoriously fast, volatile and deadly gunfighter of the Old West, who shot and killed more than 40 men, before being shot in the back of the head in 1895.
Jodie Foster's character's gracelessness in the film stems from the first scene she shot, when she waited for Mel Gibson to help her down from the stagecoach. Instead, he took her parasol and walked away. She tried to get down alone, and flopped to the ground. Director Richard Donner liked it so much that he kept the shot in the film, and staged more scenes of Foster stumbling, being dumped through windows, etc.
The $25,000 needed to enter the poker tournament in the 19th century would be nearly $1,000,000 in 2024 dollars.
In the stagecoach sequence, stuntman Mic Rodgers (doubling for Mel Gibson) had to go under the coach and get up at the back. This is a direct nod to legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt's similar stunt in Stagecoach (1939). By coincidence, second unit director Terry Leonard, a former stuntman himself, performed this same stunt in the truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). In Draw! (1984) the same stagecoach sequence can be seen in the early part of that movie.
During Marshal Cooper's explanation of the rules at the beginning of the tournament, he pulls out his own guns and claims that they're the only weapons allowed in the room (the game room). When putting them away, he drops one but smoothly continues talking while someone hands him his dropped gun. This was not scripted. James Garner dropped the prop by accident but kept acting, resulting in a funny moment that the director kept in the final cut.
Danny Glover: As a bank robber. Glover's and Mel Gibson's characters appear to almost recognize each other. This is a reference to the "Lethal Weapon" film franchise, all of which were also directed by Richard Donner. During their appearance on-screen, the "Lethal Weapon" theme song can be heard, and as Glover departs he says, "I'm getting too old for this shit", a line his character used frequently in the "Lethal Weapon" franchise.
Margot Kidder: Margret Mary, one of the pilgrims robbed of their mission money. Kidder starred as Lois Lane in Richard Donner's Superman (1978).