Hell on Wheels: what happened to Joseph? Eddie Spears explained the exit in an AMC interview
Joseph Black Moon spent two seasons of Hell on Wheels stuck between the Cheyenne and the railroad camp, then stopped appearing. Eddie Spears talked to AMC about where the character ended up — and about the scene he shot days after his own father died.
Joseph Black Moon killed two members of his own family in two seasons of Hell on Wheels, and the second one wrecked the actor playing him. Then he walked out of the camp and off the show.
Eddie Spears, of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe of South Dakota, played Joseph as a series regular across seasons 1 and 2 — all 10 episodes of the first, 6 of the second. He's not in season 3, and AMC never announced why.
Two seasons, two killings
Joseph is the son of Chief Many Horses (Wes Studi) and the younger brother of Pawnee Killer (Gerald Auger), converted and baptized by Reverend Nathaniel Cole (Tom Noonan) before the pilot. In season 1 he helps Cole raise a tent church, then misleads a Union patrol in "Derailed" to buy his family time to clear out. By the end of that season he's killed Pawnee Killer himself — Auger told AMC he filmed his own death scene and fasted for the Sun Dance sequence beforehand.
Season 2 hands him Ruth Cole (Kasha Kropinski), then takes her away. The camp finds out about them. He gets into a brawl in the church over it. Ruth turns him down. When Cole hijacks Durant's Chicago-bound train in "Purged Away with Blood" (September 16, 2012), Joseph is the one who ends it.
"The weekend before we shot that scene, I lost my father," Spears told AMC in 2012. He used it.
He also told AMC he pushed back on his own costume when Joseph returns to Cheyenne life — no feathers, no fresh leather. A man caught between two worlds wouldn't have had the time to make any of it.
His last appearance
After the killing, Joseph leaves town to fast and pray in the wilderness and comes back Cheyenne. His final scenes are in the two-part season 2 finale, "Blood Moon" and "Blood Moon Rising," which aired October 7, 2012. Cullen Bohannon asks him what it means when a man paints himself white. Joseph says it means the Sioux want everyone dead, tells him a blood moon is coming, and rides him out to the camp.
Read more: Who killed Cullen's wife in Hell on Wheels? He strangled the wrong man for it at the end of season 1
Why he never came back
Season 2 ended into a management collapse. What happened next, in order:
- The creators went — Joe and Tony Gayton's contracts weren't renewed; they stayed on as consulting producers.
- The replacement quit — John Shiban took over, then stepped down within days, citing personal reasons.
- AMC restarted — the network green-lit 10 more episodes on December 12, 2012 with John Wirth as showrunner.
- The board got cleared — Reverend Cole and Lily Bell were both dead, and Joseph was simply not written back in.
Spears's AMC exit interview ran on December 3, 2012 — nine days before AMC announced the man who would decide the show's third season without him.
Asked what he wanted next, Spears said he wanted to produce and direct, and that he'd been writing scripts — Westerns, horror, and stories from Native folklore he thought nobody outside the community knew.
For the record: he kept working in the genre. Grey Beaver in the animated White Fang (2018), a role in season 2 of Yellowstone, and a cameo in season 2 of Rutherford Falls.
Earlier we wrote: How many seasons and episodes of Hell on Wheels are there? The full count