How did Chester from Gunsmoke die? Dennis Weaver's last years, and Chester's last episode
Chester Goode vanished from Gunsmoke in 1964 without so much as a goodbye scene, and Dennis Weaver went on to a second act very few TV sidekicks ever get. Here's what became of the character, the one time the show explained his absence, and how Weaver spent his final decades before his death in 2006.
Here's the thing about Chester Goode: he never died at all. Gunsmoke's limping, coffee-obsessed deputy simply walked out of Dodge City in 1964 and the show carried on for another eleven years as if he'd never existed. The death people are usually asking about belongs to Dennis Weaver, the man who played him — and that came 42 years later.
Chester's last episode
Weaver's final appearance was "Bently," the 28th episode of season 9 and the 333rd of the series, aired April 11, 1964. Fittingly, Chester carries the episode: with Marshal Dillon out of town, he doubts a dying man's murder confession and hunts down the real killer himself. His last words on the show, spoken to the widow:
"I think maybe I'll take you down to the stage."
That was it. No farewell scene, and the next episode carried on without him. Ken Curtis's Festus Haggen took over the sidekick slot — with an actual deputy's title, which Chester never got in nine years.
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Why Weaver left
Money wasn't the issue. Weaver had gone from delivering flowers for $60 a week to $9,000 a week by the end of his run, and he'd won a Supporting Actor Emmy in 1959. He was simply done.
"I pretty much exhausted all creative possibilities with the character," he said in a 2002 Television Academy interview.
He also feared typecasting, and the limp — his own invention, added along with the twang to make a leading man read as a sidekick — was taking a physical toll after nearly a decade. James Arness later said Weaver struggled for a while to lose Chester's stiff-legged gait off camera.
The one time Gunsmoke explained it
Eleven seasons after the exit, in 1975, Dillon finally addressed the mystery. Reading through old records with Newly, he comes across Chester's name.
"He used to work for me here. He was before your time," Dillon says.
He adds that Chester left "right after the trial." Twelve words of closure, eleven years late.
Weaver's second act, and his last years
The gamble paid off. After the short-lived Kentucky Jones and the film Gentle Ben, Weaver landed McCloud, which ran on NBC from 1970 to 1977 and made him a lead at last. In 1971 he starred in Duel, Steven Spielberg's first film. He served as Screen Actors Guild president from 1973 to 1975.
Then he mostly stopped acting and started building. In the late 1980s, Weaver and his wife Gerry commissioned architect Michael Reynolds to build an "Earthship" outside Ridgway, Colorado — a 10,000-square-foot solar home made from roughly 3,000 used tires and 300,000 recycled cans, with a $50 monthly electric bill. Jay Leno asked, of the garbage man, "how does he know where the garbage begins and the house ends?" Weaver also founded the Institute of Ecolonomics and led LIFE, a charity feeding 150,000 people a week in Los Angeles County, and in 2001 drove a Prius from Los Angeles to Denver to promote alternative fuels.
Weaver died on February 24, 2006, at his Ridgway home, of complications from cancer. He was 81, still married to Gerry after 61 years, and still working — his final role, on ABC Family 's Wildfire, aired the year he died.
For the record: his ashes were scattered on his own Colorado ranch. Chester finally got out of Dodge for good.
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