The epic story of post-Civil War America, focusing on Cullen Bohannon, a Confederate soldier who sets out to exact revenge on the Union soldiers who killed his wife. His journey takes him west to Hell on Wheels, a dangerous, raucous, lawless melting pot of a town that travels with and services the construction of the first transcontinental railroad, an engineering feat unprecedented for its time.

In the 1800s, Polly, a young high-society woman from Philadelphia, travels out west on a desperate quest for a husband only to discover that she has been catfished by a teenage boy.