Dennis Weaver (Chester) and Lonny Chapman (Wade) were real-life best friends. In 1947, the two hitchhiked from the University of Oklahoma to New York City.
Wade calls his bed-ridden wife "Wendy." Wendy traditionally had been a man's name. Not until publication of Peter Pan, in 1904, in which J.M. Barrie popularized Wendy as a girl's name. At the time in which Gunsmoke set, about 1870, after the railroad arrived in Dodge, no woman would be named Wendy.