Why was Ruth hanged in Hell on Wheels? She was offered a pardon, an escape and a jailbreak — and turned down all three
The title of the episode is "Thirteen Steps," which is the number of stairs up to the gallows in Cheyenne. It aired on AMC on November 15, 2014, written by Tom Brady and directed by Roxann Dawson, and it spends most of its 42 minutes inside a jail. Nobody in town wanted Ruth Cole to hang. That includes the man legally required to do the hanging.
Ruth shot Sheriff Sidney Snow twice after he burned down her church with Ezra — the boy she was raising as her son — inside it. Snow died. At her hearing, held in a converted casino before Judge Webber, Ruth pleaded guilty and told the court she killed Snow for the reason it looked like: because he killed Ezra. Not self-defense. Intent.
That plea is the whole answer. She was sentenced to hang because she insisted on it.
Three exits, all refused
- The pardon — Acting Governor John Campbell was willing to grant one, but the law required her to formally accept it. She refused, telling him pardons are for cowards.
- The train — Cullen Bohannon tried to walk her out of the cell and put her on a train to New York. She wouldn't go.
- The muscle — Mickey McGinnes and Dandy Johnny Shea cornered Campbell in his room at the Palmer Hotel and told him the church lady wasn't going to hang. Campbell told them they could keep the casino, but they couldn't stop him enforcing the law.
Cullen also submitted a signed statement saying Ruth had protected an officer of the law from an armed felon, which would have made her innocent on paper. Campbell read it into the record. She contradicted it.
Cullen tore the gallows down with his hands
He found the hangman and his son assembling the scaffold in the town square, shoved them aside, and pulled it apart board by board. George Senior started again and worked through the night. The townspeople held a candlelit vigil outside the jail. Louise Ellison threatened her relationship with Campbell to print the story.
None of it moved her. Cullen spent the last night in the cell with her instead, and the two of them finally admitted what they'd never said out loud.
Filming it
Kasha Kropinski had played Ruth since season 1, when the character was, in her words, a bystander. She described the shoot in an AMC interview published in 2014:
"I felt like I was actually going to die," Kropinski said of the gallows trapdoor.
She noted the sun was setting during the sequence, and that the crew applauded when it wrapped.
For the record: "Thirteen Steps" pulled 1.74 million viewers, and Cullen quit the railroad by the end of the hour. He was back at it the following week.