Where did the term hell on wheels come from? The AMC series borrowed a phrase already 140 years old
AMC named a five-season Western after a phrase that was already doing heavy work in American print before a single rail was laid across Nebraska. Here's where it came from, and why the man usually credited with coining it didn't.
AMC 's Western got the phrase from the Union Pacific's construction camps, which is correct as far as it goes. The trouble is that the Union Pacific didn't invent it either.
Between 1863 and 1869, the crews building the transcontinental railroad west across the plains were followed by a portable town: saloons, gambling houses, dance halls, and brothels in canvas tents and board shanties, packed up and moved every thirty to sixty days to stay within walking distance of the railhead. That town had a name before it had an address.
What the camps actually were
The moving settlement wasn't one place. It reassembled under a series of names, each of which had a few weeks of being the most dangerous address in the country:
- North Platte, Nebraska (1866) — the first terminus to take the shape, and where the phrase got attached in print.
- Julesburg, Colorado (1867) — Henry Morton Stanley, then a reporter, dismissed it as "an overdone town, a played out place."
- Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming (1867–68) — both survived the railroad and are still there.
- Benton, Wyoming (1868) — lasted roughly ten weeks and is now a ghost town.
- Corinne, Utah Territory (1869) — generally counted as the last of them.
Army surgeon Major Henry C. Parry, passing through, described the inhabitants as "having a good time gambling, drinking, and shooting each other."
Read more: Hell on Wheels: what happens to Mickey? Phil Burke says everyone expected him to die in season one
The man who got the credit was quoting someone else
Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts, is routinely named as the man who coined the phrase. He published it in his 1869 travel book Our New West, describing the camps as populated by "restaurant and saloon keepers, gamblers, desperadoes of every grade, the vilest of men and of women." On Benton he was blunter, writing that it festered "in corruption, disorder and death," averaging roughly a murder a day.
But read his own sentence and the credit falls apart.
"This 'Hell on Wheels,' as it was most aptly termed," Bowles wrote in Our New West, 1869.
That construction does one thing: it reports a phrase already in circulation. Bowles heard it on the line and put quotation marks around it. He popularized it for an East Coast readership. He did not make it up.
It was in American print before the railroad
The phrase predates the Union Pacific entirely. Etymology records trace it to 1843, as a mock name for a Mississippi River steamboat — the joke being a floating hell with paddle wheels on it. It resurfaces in an 1863 anti-Lincoln editorial, describing forces that "run with fire and fury, like a hell on wheels — to blast and burn."
The railroad didn't coin the phrase. It gave the phrase a permanent job.
By 1868 the usage had narrowed to the vice towns, and that meaning stuck hard enough to survive everything since. The U.S. Army's 2nd Armored Division took it as a nickname in World War II.
What AMC built on it
Hell on Wheels ran on AMC from November 6, 2011 to July 23, 2016 — five seasons, 57 episodes, created by Joe and Tony Gayton, and filmed in Calgary rather than Nebraska. Anson Mount played Cullen Bohannon, a former Confederate soldier working the line; Colm Meaney played the real-life Union Pacific financier Thomas "Doc" Durant; Common played freedman Elam Ferguson. The series covers 1865 to 1869, which is almost exactly the working life of the real camps.
Count from the 1868 railroad usage to the AMC premiere and the phrase was 143 years old when the show took it. Count from the steamboat and it was 168.
Earlier we wrote: How does the Lonesome Dove series end? Four parts, and the last one is simply called "Return"