Although the opening credits credit Richard Bluel as creator, a Writers Guild of America arbitration ultimately awarded creator credit to Seaman Jacobs, Ed James, and Jim Barnett.

The plot device of the Hekawi tribe's original name, 'Fugawi', was changed after censors realized it implied the phrase 'Where the Fugawi?', leading to the joke origin story 'Where the heck are we?' becoming 'We're the Hekawi'.

The show's comedic engine of scheming non-commissioned officers running money-making rackets echoes The Phil Silvers Show (Sgt. Bilko) and shares writers and similar schemes with McHale's Navy.

Melody Patterson won the role of Wrangler Jane at just 15 years old after telling producers she was 18; she had actually turned 16 by the start of filming and was only 10 days from turning 18 when the final episode aired.

Because Melody Patterson was underage during the first season, the romance between Jane and Captain Parmenter was deliberately kept low-key, only becoming more overtly affectionate in the second season once she was older.

Actor Forrest Tucker (Sgt. O'Rourke) had actually served in the U.S. Cavalry before World War II and had previously played a similar cavalry sergeant character named O'Rourke on the show Gunsmoke.

Bob Steele, who played the aged Trooper Duffy claiming to be the lone survivor of the Alamo, had in fact appeared decades earlier as a young actor in the 1926 film With Davy Crockett at the Fall of the Alamo.

I. Stanford Jolley, who appeared as Colonel Ferguson in a 1966 episode, was actually Forrest Tucker's former father-in-law in real life.

The entire series was filmed on the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank, California.

Many of the Hekawi Indian characters, none of whom were played by actual Native American actors, were portrayed by veteran Yiddish comedians using classic Yiddish comedic shtick, playing on the myth that Native Americans descended from a lost tribe of Israel.

The character Trooper Leonard 'Wrongo' Starr, a perpetually jinxed soldier, was named as a pun on Beatles drummer Ringo Starr.

Despite still having healthy ratings (ranked 40th out of 113 shows) after its second season, the show was cancelled reportedly because Warner Bros.' new owners, Seven Arts, felt it was wasteful to dedicate so much of the studio ranch to a single half-hour show, and because of the added costs of producing it in color.

A feature film adaptation was in development as early as 1992, at one point considering Leslie Nielsen and Martin Short for the roles of O'Rourke and Agarn, but the project moved between several studios through the 1990s and was never completed.