The Wells Fargo treasure map

It's hard to believe anyone could ever find the buried Wells Fargo gold dust by following Dandy Jim Buckley's map. Since the gold dust was stolen in Vermillion, it stands to reason that the map would use the town as a point from which to start. But no other landmarks on the map make any sense. The problem lies in the fact that there are simply no mountains within 400 miles of the town.[2]

At first blush, it might be assumed that the mountainous region depicted in "Stampede" is in the Black Hills. After all, that is where Bret Maverick and Buckley were headed. There are even several points in the Black Hills that are or could be called Twin Peaks. There is even an area called Mountain Meadow near Deadwood.

But Bret had stated that Deadwood was more than four hundred miles from the island on which he and Buckley were stranded. This much was true. He also stated they were stranded sixty miles downriver from Vermillion. Bret told us that three days later, he and Buckley spotted their first landmark, the Twin Peaks. However, they could not have ridden even half the distance to the Black Hills in only three days, so the Twin Peaks could not truly have been the snow-capped mountains rising above the tall pines as depicted in the episode.

To make the placement of the Twin Peaks and Mountain Meadow in the Black Hills even more unbelievable, it would have required Bret and Buckley to not only ride more than four hundred miles in a mere three days, but to turn around to ride nearly the same distance back to Vermillion to collect the reward money for the Wells Fargo gold dust, and then turn around yet again to repeat the distance all the way into Deadwood... a total of well over 1,200 miles.

Therefore, we must assume and accept that the Twin Peaks were not the towering crags as shown in the episode, and that the Mountain Meadow could not truly have been in the mountains at all. Rather, they must have been within a short distance from Vermillion, since that is the only town on  the map, and what passed for mountains in that region could only have been the bluffs skirting the southern edge of the Missouri River floodplain bordering Nebraska... hardly a mountainous area.

But once we accept this geological contradiction, the story falls back into place. There is a small ravine between two facing bluffs across the Missouri River from Vermillion. It is there that the men who robbed the Vermillion Wells Fargo office likely headed with their loot. With the Vermillion posse hot on their trail, the surviving outlaw could have evaded the pursuit in the draws and gullies in the Nebraska bluffs, buried the gold dust and made his getaway.

Some things in "Stampede" are wild as the wind in Oregon, such as:

The Whiskey Flats jail

If Bret Maverick could easily dig his way out from inside a Whiskey Flats jail cell,[1] why couldn't he and Dandy Jim Buckley just as easily have tunneled under the jail from outside to begin with, and avoid the risk of entering the cell all together? Perhaps they did not know how fortified the perimeter of the jail was before Bret was forced to escape with the tools he had on hand.

"He's hairy, but he's no grizzly bear."

What does Madame Pompey know about Noah Perkins that we don't? She described Perkins as hairy to Tony Cadiz when she placed her bet that her Mystery Man could beat Battling Kreuger in a boxing match. But from what we've seen, he seemed to be fairly devoid of body hair.[1]

"Don't leave till just before the fight, or Cadiz will smell a rat."

Since Madame Pompey placed her bet with Tony Cadiz on a "Mystery Man" against Battling Kreuger, Dandy Jim Buckley suggested Bret Maverick could pass himself off as the fighter when Perkins dropped out of the fight. But Jack Blair had already told Cadiz the Mystery Man was Noah Perkins, a man he described as big, stupid, afraid of his own shadow and believed he could talk to the animals.[1] Surely, Cadiz would have known something was wrong when Bret showed up instead of Perkins. He should have been suspicious of Blair's claim and could have called off the fight before it began. Perhaps he proceeded with the fight in spite of the switch, believing Bret was no match for the Battler.[3]