The weekend before shooting was scheduled to wrap, a freak storm dumped nearly two feet of snow on the drought plagued town. Laborers shovelled the snow from the buildings' balconies and roofs, and distributed eighty-nine dump trucks worth of dry soil on the ground. Backhoes created an eight foot tall rampart of snow just beyond camera sight lines for the remaining six days of shooting.
In a deleted scene (included on the DVD), Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) tells Byron McElroy (Peter Fonda), "I heard that your boss, Al Pinkerton, got an infection from biting his own tongue, and he died last month. Is that true?" Allan Pinkerton did die from an infected bite on his tongue, on July 1, 1884. This would place the events of the movie as occurring in August, 1884.
Warned about the pain of surgery, Byron McElroy (Peter Fonda) tells Doc Potter (Alan Tudyk) that it's not the first time he's been shot. In real life, Peter Fonda accidentally shot himself in the stomach when he was ten.
Russell Crowe was director James Mangold's first choice for the role of Ben Wade. After Tom Cruise dropped out of talks for the film, putting it into turnaround, it was the casting of Crowe that got the production back up and running.
The short, dark-bearded man whom Doc Potter (Alan Tudyk) hits in the face with a shovel in the tunnels is this movie's weapons expert, Mike Tristano.