How True to History is the TV Series Hell on Wheels? Were the Show's Characters Based Upon Real People?

The series Hell on Wheels for the most part did an accurate job depicting the people who worked in Hell on Wheels camps and the prostitutes who traveled along with them. These traveling camps sprang up along the route of the transcontinental railroad. Those who followed the train’s progress were saloon keepers, professional gamblers, prostitutes, and doctors. Wherever the line of railroad construction was apparent, the towns sprang up. Merchants, with information gleaned from the railroad, then moved in to establish a community that they hoped would be permanent but was usually temporary. When the railroad moved on, so did the temporary towns as well.

In the Hell on Wheels makeshift towns, the sheer number of canvas tents resembled refugee camps. Some had wooden frontispieces attached to give them the impression of permanence. The streets were no more than dirt with an array of rough-hewn boards laid out in random patterns to allow walking without getting too much dirt and mud on shoes and clothing. They were very muddy after downpours, and the ladies had to walk slowly on the wooden paths, doing their best to navigate the tent city.

In the TV series, the feisty prostitute Eva Toole cautions a female surveyor who sets up residence in a tent to lay down boards on the floor of her tent, so she does not get trench foot. It shows how these camps were muddy, gritty, and wet.

A typical camp had a church tent and a bathing tent that advertised hot soap and water for 5 cents. A saloon tent abutted a large gambling hall giving visitors access to all things vice. A dry goods store sold everything from tools to canned goods. Medical care was dispensed from a tent that looked like something from a Mathew Brady Civil War photograph. Dirty and bandaged men lined up to see the doctor for various ailments.

Were the characters who worked on the railroad realistically portrayed in the Hell on Wheels series?

For the most part, yes. The transcontinental railroad was built by Civil War veterans from both the North and the South who worked together, along with Mormon settlers, African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese laborers. The railroads in the west were built mostly by the Chinese. They were the best employees the railroads had.  Unlike some of the other workers, they were healthy for the most part.  They ate well-balanced diets of fish, fruit, and tea. How and where did they get food like that out in the middle of nowhere? They planned ahead.  And knew how to keep the food fresh.

In the series, Bohannon labored alongside the Chinese in the west who were laying down tracks for the transcontinental railroad. Together, they used black powder and nitroglycerin to dynamite the solid granite of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to open a path so that the railroad tracks could be laid, and the train would be able to travel east. It was dangerous work and many workers did not survive. Bohannon barely made it himself.

The actors in the TV series Hell on Wheels played characters who were loosely based upon real people. Let us start with the ladies and one of my favorite people from the show.

The prostitute Eva Toole’s character was partially based upon Olive Oatman, later known as The Girl with The Blue Tattoo. Like Eva, Olive was marked with a chin tattoo by the Indians. Olive's was blue, whereas Eva’s was black.

Here is a bit more about Olive Oatman's fascinating life. She was born in 1851 and when she was thirteen years old, her family left their home in Illinois with a group of fellow Mormons and formed a wagon train headed to California.  Her father hoped to take advantage of the gold rush and find suitable work at the mills. Through hardships and privations, many of their fellow travelers got sick and died; they left the wagon train behind and traveled by themselves to present-day Arizona, where they were attacked by nineteen Yavapai Indians who bludgeoned to death most of her family, including her parents.  She witnessed her brother being dragged by the heels and thrown over a cliff.  The Indians ripped the cover off her family’s prairie schooner, removed part of the wheels, and then took most of the food her parents stored to stave off starvation on their treacherous journey.

She and her eight-year-old sister were kidnapped by the savages and forced to walk barefoot so that a search party would not be able to follow their tracks.  They walked sixty miles for four days until they made it to their camp.  When her sister died from the rigors of our journey, Olive never felt so alone.

She truly thought that her life was over, and she would never be able to endure what these cruel savages had inflicted upon her family until she found herself being traded to another tribe of Indians, the Mohave.  She was treated kindly by them and they raised her as one of their own until they traded her back to the whites in exchange for blankets, horses, and beads when she was eighteen.

Eva Toole in Hell on Wheels also was kidnapped by the Indians when she was young, and they taught her and raised her as one of their own. Olive Oatman, unlike Eva, was never a prostitute in Hell on Wheels camps or anywhere else. After joining the world of the white people, she spent the rest of her life on the lecture circuit.

The character Cullen Bohannon was loosely modeled on Union Major Gen. Grenville M. Dodge and, more precisely, Union Brigadier Gen. John S. Casement, who was Chief Engineer and lead foreman of the construction crews.  Bohannon, like Dodge and Casement personified the spirit and dedication when it came to completing the railroad.

Casement and his entourage did not have to deal with the hardships experienced by the others who lived in the Hell on Wheels camps. As the railroad’s chief engineer and head of construction, General Jack Casement spent his time in a work train consisting of eighty cars, which included bunkhouses for the workers, a bakery, a kitchen and dining room, and a telegraph car. There was a herd of cattle which had been driven along-side the work train, and they were kept in pens until the railroad needed to go to the next Hell on Wheels town.

A colorful character in the TV series was Thomas Durant, one of the earliest financiers of the railroad. He was in charge of money raising and corruptly lined his own pockets along the way. His main objective was to make money, whether the railroad was completed or not. Since the government provided bonds for each mile laid, Durant made sure that the tracts were not laid in a straight line, but instead, they were arranged in large circular oxbows.  He sold the land along the railroad tracks and made himself rich.

Here are a few interesting stories about Thomas Durant. The railroad workers had not received their wages for some time and an armed mob of workers surrounded his private car and chained the wheels to the rails until he acquiesced and had their wages transferred from the headquarters in New York.

More problems ensued for Mr. Durant. Traveling with dignitaries to the ceremony that commemorated the Golden Spike, where the railroad from the east met that of the west in Promontory Point, Utah, heavy rains washed out part of the Union Pacific’s tracks, and Thomas Durant and other dignitaries were stuck in their train car while the tracks were repaired, almost missing the celebration. Once at the ceremony, Durant had brought along golden spikes and a silver-headed sledgehammer to pound in the commemorative last spike, signifying that this grand engineering feat of building a transcontinental railroad was a success. Durant tried to hammer the golden spikes, but missed, to the amusement of many of the track layers who had labored so long.  Finally, the spikes were hammered down, only to be taken off later.

In the TV series, after the railroad was built, Bohannon sailed off to China in the hopes of building a new life with a Chinese woman he loved, and there the series ended. In real life, after the two trains met in Promontory Point, the nation would never be the same. Within three years of its completion, trains could travel from New York City to San Francisco in just one week.  Prior to that, travelers endured up to 6 months or more of dangerous travel by ship or covered wagon to cross the continent.

Word of abundant opportunities, high wages, and the temperate and healthful California climate spread, and over the years to come many emigrated to California and the landscape was forever transformed by the many towns, farms, and citrus groves.