Hell on Wheels

and I like his new wife for him so much. I'm hoping that works out. The poor guy deserves some happiness.  

This is his wife...

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I thought she is planning on leaving him and going back east ?  

That is Common's wife. She sent

Spoiler:

I was speaking of the Mormon girl who shotgun married Cullen because

Spoiler:

. I think those two could really come to be a great love story.

Oh, You may be right. How old is she....15 or so ?..... 

Nice interview with Anson Mount about his new movie and upcoming season of HoW. Back on August 2  

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Good interview. I'm not interested in that movie but look forward to Aug. 2nd.  It seems like its been gone a long time.

Good addition !

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I caught the first new episode. There was quite a mistake made by the Guy in charge of the railroad. Made for a great visual. Still lots of stuff happening. Glad its back!   

Any Ice Road Trucker fan would know that you don't start across a frozen lake without insuring that you have adequate traction. On the trucks they use chains of course. On the locomotive he should have had sand in the hopper. Even in those days they used sand sprayed under the driver wheels to get traction in slippery conditions, and they would never stop on the ice, truck or train.

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There are spoilers....I haven't watched the latest episode on DVR so was taken by surprise.....be warned.

But Common is a good actor. I had never heard of him before his HOW role. The fact that he is a 'rapper' means that you would have to pay me a LOT !! of money before I would even walk across the street to experience that part of his "talent". He should stick to acting.

It was good to see that he fired the Gatling gun at a more realistic rate. Often in westerns the gunner turns the crank way too fast and it would jam at that attempted rate.


Hell on Wheels Handbook – The Gatling Gun

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This week’s Hell on Wheels Handbook takes a closer look at the Gatling gun, the weapon Psalms operates in the Hell on Wheels Season 2 Finale, and the latest episode.

The legendary Gatling Battery gun, invented by Richard J. Gatling, was an early hand-cranked machine gun that played a significant role in the conquest of the American West. The original design, patented in 1862, was fairly simple: as the crank was turned, six rifle barrels rotated around a central axis. Bullets were loaded, and strikers behind each barrel fired shots. The earliest models released 200 shots per minute, far more than even the most experienced marksman could achieve.

Despite the weapon’s destructive capabilities, Gatling promoted the gun as a humanitarian device. He reasoned that a regiment armed with it would fire more rounds per soldier than one without the weapon, reducing the number of men needed and therefore the number of casualties.

Gatling spent the entire Civil War trying to convince the Union Army to adopt his gun. While the weapon was deployed in a few battles, the U.S. Army didn’t officially approve it until 1866. By then, Gatling had refined his design substantially, and the Army was frequently equipped with Gatling guns to defend railroad workers, settlements, tracks and materials against Indian attacks.

An advertisement for it boasted that the Gatling gun would do for firearms what McCormick’s reaper did for the sickle and the sewing machine for the common needle. By the end of the 19th century, the Gatling gun had fulfilled that promise, becoming “a brand name that meant blood and thunder” and carving out a niche as the West’s great weapon of terror.

I just watched this and it has devolved into way too much gory violence for my taste.

But it has been announced it will have a 5th season. & episodes next summer and 7 the year after that.

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That's good. I haven't seen the latest DVR. Of course no amount of blood and guts will dissuade me but I wonder in view of the renewals how long they can be out there building the railroad ? Eventually they did meet up with the crews coming from the west. But that happened in Utah, and since they are still in Wyoming with crossing the mountains yet to come I suppose there are still plenty of plot points to explore.

Finally watched the first two eps of this season. They may have shown a little too much footage of Sydney's demise, but otherwise it did feature several historical facts. Using coffee to stem blood flow was a technique in the Civil War where battlefield medics were unknown. Also the beheadings that Ruth witnessed as a young girl in KS was true to life. In pre-Civil War days it was known as "Bloody KS."  because the Abolitionists were running rampant there hunting and executing any slave owners they could find. How many executions were done by beheading rather than hanging I don't know but I suspect the latter method was more popular given the less 'messy' result.  

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But the prods and writers seem to have a thing for killing off the major  female characters, Common not withstanding.

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Hell on Wheels returns July 18th (this Saturday) .

So this opened well. But looks like Bohannan is going to have a lot on his plate to deal with. Hope they are paying him enough.

It was  a good one.  It's almost hard to believe that they could tunnel through solid rock, through the Sierra Nevadas using nothing more than picks and shovels and black powder.  Dynamite had been invented right around the time of S2, which has more explosive power with smaller quantities and is safer to use but it hadn't gone into widespread use yet. .  It looks like they have mostly an all new supporting cast which makes sense since they are out west now with Chinese laborers rather than black, and the woman with the Indian chin tattoos went back east last season, if I recall.... Of course the Swede and Colin are still there....

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I guess last night was the end of the first part of the split season as AMC likes to do.  

When Brigham Young's son stabbed him to death I thought that was taking a lot of liberty with history, and sure enough he actually died from a ruptured appendix in Salt Lake City about a year after that episode takes place.  Also we see that the railroad actually went northwest of Ogden, not south through SLC as Young wanted. There is a monument up there showing where the two railroads met.

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