How much of Hell on Wheels is true? Thomas Durant was real — the rest needs sorting character by character
AMC's railroad western built five seasons around one genuinely historical figure and invented nearly everyone standing next to him. Here's how the cast of Hell on Wheels lines up against the record of the Union Pacific, character by character, and which liberties the Gayton brothers took with the parts that were real.
Fifty-seven episodes, five seasons, and a construction project that genuinely happened. The people doing the constructing are another matter entirely.
Thomas "Doc" Durant is the load-bearing historical figure, and Colm Meaney's version is closer to the record than you'd expect. Cullen Bohannon never existed. Eva did, under a different name. Almost everyone else was invented outright.
Durant, the real one
Thomas Clark Durant (1820–1885) was born in Lee, Massachusetts, graduated cum laude from Albany Medical College in 1840, and briefly served as assistant professor of surgery before abandoning medicine for his uncle's grain export business. The "Doc" is accurate. The show's claim that he clawed his way out of poverty in Hell's Kitchen is not — his family was comfortable.
He became Union Pacific vice-president and general manager in 1863 via stock manipulation, organised Crédit Mobilier of America in 1864, and lost control of it to Oliver and Oakes Ames in 1867 while clinging to his seat on the UP board. He was never president of the railroad. Oliver Ames was.
The most theatrical thing the show could have invented actually happened: around April 27–28, 1869, Union Pacific work gangs seized Durant's private car in Wyoming and held it for back wages, which is why the golden spike ceremony slipped from May 8 to May 10.
Durant helped drive the spike at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869, and the Ames faction removed him from the Union Pacific board on May 25. Fifteen days.
He was ruined by the Panic of 1873, spent his last years quietly in the Adirondacks, and died in Warren County, New York on October 5, 1885. The series' single largest liberty is that its Durant schemes his way back onto the railroad after his fall. The real one never did.
Bohannon is two men in a coat
Anson Mount's ex-Confederate is an invention, assembled from Union Pacific track boss John S. "Jack" Casement and chief engineer Grenville Dodge. Creators Joe and Tony Gayton considered writing Dodge in as himself and dropped the idea once they realised Dodge's achievements had already been reassigned to Bohannon.
Dodge's real postscript is the sort of thing the show would have used if it hadn't already spent him: when the railroad was finished, he relocated to Texas partly to avoid being called to testify against Durant.
Read more: Hell on Wheels: what happened to Joseph? Eddie Spears explained the exit in an AMC interview
Eva is a real woman with the serial numbers filed off
Robin McLeavy's tattooed Eva is drawn from Olive Ann Oatman, whose family was attacked by Yavapai in 1851 while travelling west. She was traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her chin, and she was eventually returned to white society. The show keeps the mechanism and the meaning — on screen, Eva explains her markings as three blankets and two horses, her purchase price.
It wasn't a coincidence. Jami O'Brien, the only woman in the writers' room in season 1, had already written a play about Oatman. McLeavy told Cowboys & Indians in 2021 that O'Brien had the character ready and waiting:
"Olive Oatman, the real person Eva is based on"
Who else actually existed
- Collis P. Huntington — real, and really ran the Central Pacific building east from California. His on-screen recruitment of Bohannon is fiction.
- Ulysses S. Grant — real, but the show has him involved in Union Pacific business years before the presidency would have put him there.
- John Allen Campbell — real first governor of Wyoming Territory, appointed in 1869. He turns up in season 4 while the railroad is still near Cheyenne, which it reached in 1867. He also had no recorded quarrel with Durant, and his actual claim to history is that Wyoming became the first US jurisdiction to grant women the vote under him.
- Brigham Young — real, and given the least generous available reading. His son never attempted to assassinate him.
- George Custer — real, and used in the finale to make Grant's job offer to Bohannon look exactly as unappealing as it should.
- Crédit Mobilier — real, and the congressional bribery and fraud hearings that close the series are the correct ending for Durant even if the show gets him there by an invented route.
Who didn't
Elam Ferguson, the Swede, Lily Bell, Mickey and Sean McGinnes, Naomi Hatch, and Mei are all original creations. Elam is the significant one: Common's character is fictional, but tens of thousands of Black men did lay track, blast tunnels, and build bridges for the railroads, and those jobs were sought after precisely because they paid better and more steadily than most work available to Black Americans at the time.
The tent cities were real too. "Hell on wheels" was the contemporary name for the mobile towns of saloons, brothels, and gambling houses that followed the railhead west, and the multilingual, multiracial workforce the show puts in them is an accurate picture of who built the thing.
For the record: Durant's ring in the finale is forged from golden spike metal and he pawns it. The real Durant's estate was worth roughly $2 million when he died, which by the standards of what passed through his hands is close enough to the same joke.
Earlier we wrote: Who killed Cullen's wife in Hell on Wheels? He strangled the wrong man for it at the end of season 1