Anecdotes

There were tensions between Scott and Wayne during filming. Scott's contract with Universal entitled him to billing above Wayne who was on loan from Republic, but he too had wanted the role of Glennister. Wayne was also depressed by his recent separation, and Dietrich sought to distract him with outings to restaurants and sporting events as well as hunting and fishing trips on weekends.

The climactic fistfight is one of the longest in cinema and lasts just under four minutes.

According to the studio continuity report, the fight scene took five days to plot and shoot.

This is the fourth of five film version of the novel by Rex Beach. The previous versions were The Spoilers (1914), The Spoilers (1923), and The Spoilers (1930). The fifth version was The Spoilers (1955). William Farnum starred as Roy Glenister in the first version and plays the lawyer, Wheaton, in the fourth. Prints of all five versions of "The Spoilers" survive.

During the scene where John Wayne and Harry Carey are applying cork to their faces, they do a back-and-forth joke routine using the names Bones and Tambo. These names originated in minstrel shows that began in the 1840s, where a troupe of musicians in blackface would sit in a semi-circle with one of the endmen playing the bones (clappers) and the other endman playing tambourine. These two members would refer to each other as "Mr. Bones" and "Mr. Tambo," and would engage in an exchange of jokes between the group's songs and dances.

Robert W. Service: c. (1874-1958) : "Poet of the Yukon" as himself having just finished his most famous work "The Shooting of Dan McGrew." According to biographer G.W. Lockhart, Service found Dietrich's voice so distracting that it took 17 takes for him to get his few lines right, only to be told: "It's lousy, but we'll let it go."