Other: When the Sioux and Dunbar are leaving for the buffalo hunt, one of the young boys riding a horse is wearing a pair of low-cut black converse Allstar sneakers. You can see it as they are riding away from the camera.

Continuity: The piece of meat that Dunbar offers the wolf changes shape and size dramatically throughout that scene.

Continuity: When Lt. Dunbar goes to bed, Cisco the horse is in the corral, unsaddled. When Dunbar wakes up the next morning and says "bad horse," the horse is waiting at the door to the cabin with his saddle and blanket on.

Continuity: When Kevin Costner commands Robert Pastorelli to get down off the wagon and help him unload, Pastorelli has egg white in his teeth, on his lips and in his nostril. When Costner points his revolver at him, all the mess has disappeared.

Continuity: When the Sioux men come to steal Dunbar's horse, Dunbar jumps into waist-deep water as he runs toward the corral. As soon as he climbs the river bank, his pants are dry.

Revealing: During the buffalo hunt, where the buffalo turns to charge the fallen Indian, the buffalo has a nose ring used for leading domestic animals.

Continuity: In the scene where Kevin Costner is playing with the wolf on the prairie and the Sioux see him doing so. Costner is on the ground when the wolf runs away and the camera cuts to the Sioux coming toward Costner. In the scene of the Sioux approaching him he is seen in the distance standing. The camera returns to a close-up of Costner and he is on the ground again.

Revealing: In the extended version of the film during the buffalo hunt, there is a shot of a buffalo making a turn and in the distant horizon, you can briefly see a modern radio tower on top of a hill.

Revealing: The U.S. Army killed the wolf friend of Dunbar, and in the following scene, the camera shows the wolf body while the Army moves away. If you stop the scene, you can see that the "wild" wolf has a strap around his neck.

Factual error: We see and hear geese flying overhead toward the end of the film, a sure sign that winter is approaching, but the birds in the shot are sandhill cranes, which do not "honk" like Canadian geese.

Factual error: When Lt. Dunbar is preparing for his meeting with the Indians, you can see the rubber sole of his boot as he is putting it on. There is also a stamped logo on the boot heel. Rubber bottomed boots did not exist during the Civil War.

Continuity: When Timmons and Dunbar get to the deserted camp, Timmons has pieces of egg all over his face in the close shots, but none at all in the farther away shots.

Continuity: When Kevin Costner gets hit on the head by the top frame of the door, he is knocked out unconscious. Yet, when he gets back up after regaining consciousness, the blood from is head had been running down his nose. Don't you think that as he was lying down in a horizontal position, the blood would run down over the eyes towards the ears?

Revealing: In the scene where Dunbar comes to the Indian camp with the wounded woman he found, she is supposedly knocked out. However, when the Indian warrior grabs her wrist and pulls her to the tribe, she is also hanging strongly, with her hand around his wrist.

Continuity: At the close of the buffalo hunt, Wind in his Hair cuts out the liver of the buffalo, holding it in two hands. He stands to take a bite out of it and it's already about half its previous size. When he hands it to John Dunbar, it shrinks dramatically in size again, and is a different colour and shape.

Visible crew/equipment: In the scene where the Sioux discover the rotting dead buffalo lying in the valley, as they are riding by them, right after they show a Sioux woman crying, in the background you can see a man with dark hair in a white shirt lying on the ground. In the special edition DVD, if you watch this scene with the commentary on you will hear Kevin Costner and Jim Wilson admit that it is an assistant cameraman trying to get out of the scene.

Continuity: When Cisco comes to Dunbar on the morning after the hunt, Cisco's "US" brand is missing.

Continuity: When Kicking Bird is trying to steal Cisco and Dunbar frightens him away, he falls over the fence. He scares his horse, who runs off to his right. But then Kicking Bird jumps up and runs to his left, and suddenly his horse is waiting for him there, standing still.

Continuity: The buffalo that charges Smiles A Lot is shown on its left hand side, with no arrows. But the shot changes and when the buffalo is shown again, he has 3 arrows stuck in his left side.

Factual error: In an opening scene Kevin Costner is seen eating a Delicious Apple, a variety not created until after the Civil War.