American Experience

Narrator: It has been called an American pyramid — a sixty-story colossus of concrete, built in the middle of a desert every bit as brutal as in ancient Egypt.

T. H. Watkins, Author/Historian: Hoover Dam changed the history of the West. This is the biggest damned dam that anybody had ever seen.

Donald Wolf, Author/Engineer: There were many people who said it was physically impossible to build Hoover Dam, engineers who said that.

Narrator: In the 1930s thousands of unemployed men came to this desolate canyon and, for a few dollars a day, risked their lives to build Hoover Dam. One hundred twelve died on the job, while extreme heat and working conditions brought illness or injury to uncounted others.

Ila Clements-Davey, Worker’s Daughter: Everybody that came here was desperate or they left before they even got a job. It was…about the worst nightmare you could think of working in.

Narrator: Their challenge was to harness the country’s wildest river, the mighty Colorado, to bring water, power and people to the Southwest. Now, in a more environmentally-conscious age, many wish Hoover Dam had never been built. Yet it stands as a monument to the ingenuity, and the sheer human will, that forever changed the face of America.

W.A. Davis, Photographer: I loved that old river. It was beautiful. I’d swam the river, I’d boated the river, I’d taken people up the river on trips… I felt bad to see it tamed to tell you the truth.

Narrator: The Colorado was a river unlike any other— dark and red with mud and silt from carving out the planet’s most magnificent canyons. It ran wild until 1901, when Western farmers set out to tame it. Their plan was to water the desert. Developers dug a canal system that brought the River into lower California, and turned parched soil into a vast agricultural paradise they called the Imperial Valley. For four bountiful years farmers thought they were living a miracle. Then, without warning, the river struck back. In 1905 the Colorado tore open the canal and flooded the valley, creating an inland sea across 150 square miles. Over the next two decades, floods would wipe out thousands of farmers. Millions of dollars were lost.

Blaine Hamann, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: The river was an enemy, and only in short periods of time could you look at it as a useful river. Most of the time it was something that would kill you or ruin your farm.

Guy Louis Rocha, Nevada State Archivist: The Colorado River was out of control and everybody says, “We have no dams, we need a dam,” and people started seriously looking at where to put a dam after 1907, up and down the river.

Narrator: The 1,400-mile Colorado became the obsession of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the agency charged with finding ways to irrigate the arid West. In 1920 the Bureau embarked on an ambitious plan to dam the Colorado and distribute its water hundreds of miles in every direction. It was called the Boulder Canyon Project. Survey crews were sent down the treacherous river to look for the best place to build what would be the largest dam in America.

Blaine Hamann, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: One of the slogans at the time for the river was that it was “too thick to drink and too thin to plow.”

Narrator: The battle to conquer the Colorado soon turned deadly. On December 20th, 1922, a surveyor, J.G. Tierney, fell off a boat and drowned. Tierney was the first man to die working on the project.

Man (archival): This is the site in the Black Canyon, picked first by Homer Hamlin in nineteen hundred and seventeen. The dam will be about…

Narrator: After four years of surveys and tests, Bureau engineers chose Black Canyon, on the Arizona-Nevada border, as the site for Boulder Dam. But the $165 million price tag for a Western water system made the Eastern establishment nervous.

Guy Louis Rocha, Nevada State Archivist: The thing is, this was not a done deal, politically. It had to be sold in Washington, DC, it had to be sold to Congress. Politics had been dominated in the East. To talk about flood control in the West was to allow the West to get up and ask for more than they had been asking for.

Narrator: An uncommon sight began to spring up in the rugged canyon — politicians running the river in three-piece suits. One of them was Herbert Hoover, the Secretary of Commerce, and a former engineer. In 1922 Hoover negotiated an agreement among the seven western states that shared rights to the water to be captured by the proposed Dam. With the contract in hand, the project cleared its first big political hurdle. But convincing Congress to send millions out West for the most expensive public project ever seemed impossible… until the Bureau came up with the way to pay for it—electricity. By selling the dam’s hydroelectric power, the Bureau would fuel the growth of farms and cities across the emerging Southwest. Los Angeles, its ever-sprawling metropolis, would be by far the single biggest customer.

W.P. Whitsett, Chairman, Metropolitan Water District (archival): We here in Southern California, we’re building a great empire. If we are to survive and to grow, we must have the water that will enable us to maintain our mastery over the desert.

Narrator: In 1929 after twelve years of intense lobbying, Congress finally authorized the funds. It was welcome news for a nation fallen on hard times.

W.A. Davis, Photographer: We was in a depression, flat on its back, belly up. The press made an announcement that the government was going to build the largest dam in the world, so I went over to a car lot and bought a ’26 Essex car for $75 dollars, got into it and took off for Las Vegas.

Narrator: Las Vegas, of all places. Thirty miles from Black Canyon, it was the only town anywhere near the dam site. Suddenly, thousands of jobless Americans were heading for a down-on-its-luck railroad stop in the middle of nowhere.

Guy Louis Rocha, Nevada State Archivist: They were desperate for work. And they were coming from anywhere and everywhere. Las Vegas was the mecca. Las Vegas was an opportunity, Las Vegas was a place to bring one’s family and maybe have a livelihood.

W.A. Davis, Photographer: Everybody took for granted that there was a job, might be a job available when they got there. But the government didn’t warn the people that building of the dam wouldn’t start for almost a year, there wouldn’t be any jobs. And to come out and set up camp out in the desert was a pretty rough deal.

Guy Louis Rocha, Nevada State Archivist: People were living hand to mouth, living at the Union Pacific Railroad Station on the grass, courthouse grass. The town was overwhelmed.

Narrator: Others moved farther out toward Black Canyon, to a deadly, desert place they called Ragtown.

Ila Clements-Davey, Worker’s Daughter: There was just nothing. There was no facilities. Nothing. It was just, you dumped the family out in the desert and that’s it. And down where we were it was like 130 degrees. And my mother and father didn’t even have a tent. And my grandmother was so afraid, she didn’t think that we’d live through it. And she says, “I don’t think I’ll ever see you again. Won’t you please reconsider and come.” And Mother said, “No, I’ve got to be with my husband.”

Guy Louis Rocha, Nevada State Archivist: I suspect most people came from places where things were green. There was nothing green around here. Everything was baked, and hot, and brown. This was their future. As scary as it looked, as fearful as this terrain was, this was their future and they knew it.

Narrator: By the summer of 1930, the government had not yet hired a contractor to build the Dam. But the Bureau did begin laying rail and phone lines from Las Vegas out to Black Canyon. It hardly solved the unemployment problem, but it was a start. On September 17th, Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of the Interior for Herbert Hoover, who was now President, came out to drive a silver railroad spike and mark the project’s official beginning. Most Americans blamed Hoover for doing nothing about the Depression, and he badly needed some good press. Wilbur, wearing a wool suit in 100-degree heat, had his work cut out for him.

W.A. Davis, Photographer: Secretary Wilbur drove the spike, he missed it about three or four times. And of course there was a lot of miners in the background to tell him what a poor punk he was. I think that he was quite embarrassed.

Narrator: But Wilbur’s most lasting blow was struck in his closing remarks.

Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of the Interior (archival): I have the honor and privilege of giving a name to this new structure. In Black Canyon, under the Boulder Canyon Project Act, it shall be called the Hoover Dam.

W.A. Davis, Photographer: That really went over like lead balloon. Boy, you should have heard them. They hooted and they hollered and called him a sonofabitch and everything else they could think of.

Narrator: The Dam’s new name would be a subject of dispute for the next seventeen years. Builders from around the country came to study Black Canyon. But whoever did the job would have to come up with a $5 million performance bond, a risk far beyond the means of any one construction company. In the West, a group of independent contractors formed a partnership they called Six Companies. Prominent among them were Henry Kaiser, an ambitious young road builder from Oakland, California, and his mentor, Warren A. Bechtel, a powerful old-line San Francisco contractor.

T. H. Watkins, Author/Historian: The compelling temptation to build this thing drove them. They just wanted it. There was money to be made. But there was something beyond that. This was the biggest project that anybody had ever thought of.

Narrator: The men of Six Companies would be gambling their money and their reputations. But they had an ace in the hole—the one man they believed could pull it off—an engineer named Frank Crowe.

Donald Wolf, Author/Engineer: He was a commander, a field commander. Everybody knew he was good at his work. Everybody knew he was firm and fair and consistent. What he loved best was gettin’ his boots muddy down in the river bottoms building dams.

Narrator: Frank Crowe had once been the Bureau of Reclamation’s Number One dam builder. But when the Bureau decided to hire outside contractors for their most ambitious dam ever, Crowe quit his government job and signed on with the men who planned to build it.

Al M. Rocca, Crowe Biographer: He was wild to build that dam. This was his dream. And he wanted to be known as the greatest dam builder who ever lived in America. When Frank Crowe appeared on the scene, he was unmistakable, let’s put it that way, at, uh, six foot-three to six foot-four in height. A commanding presence that made a lot of men feel like, wow, he’s the boss.

Narrator: But even a man like Frank Crowe was unprepared for a place like Black Canyon.

Blaine Hamann, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: It looks like it could be some place on the moon. Nothing but hard solid rock and deep canyon. Everything was just harsh, harsh, harsh.

Narrator: A Six Companies engineer admitted they “were all scared stiff.” The government’s plans called for a massive concrete wedge over 700 feet high, twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and two football fields wide at the bottom. Workers would have to build two power plants at the base, and dig four long tunnels through hard canyon rock to divert the river around the work site. They would need to pour 4 1/2 million cubic yards of concrete— enough for a two lane road from Los Angeles to Boston— and build a city in the desert, virtually overnight, to house 5,000 workers and their families.

On March 4th 1931, Frank Crowe submitted Six Companies’ winning bid. In Las Vegas, the waiting was finally over.

Maxine Riepen, Secretary, Employment Office: There were hordes of men there, desperate men.

Narrator: Maxine Riepen was fresh out of Las Vegas High School when she got a job at the dam’s employment office. Her boss Leonard Blood reported that in its first three weeks his office had received 12,000 letters of inquiry.

Maxine Riepen, Secretary, Employment Office: A man came in one time. Mr. Blood took a look at him and says, “You’re too old!” He had a gruff voice and, uh, the man had white hair. The man looked so dejected. And he went out, and a couple of weeks later, here comes this man back in, and he’s dyed his hair, he’s changed his name and he got in line and Mr. Blood didn’t even recognize him. I did because I was sitting there watching him all the time. And that time he got a job.

Tommy Nelson, Worker: I was playing with a dance band in Grand Junction, Colorado, practically starving to death, y’know. People were so poor they couldn’t afford to dance. So my dad says if you come out I can getcha a job. Well, little did I know, I’ve never done anything but blow that horn. I didn’t know what to expect.

Blaine Hamann, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: Trying to imagine what it must have been to go down there and start work on that site you know, leaves me with a feeling like, you know, what if you were the first one to dive down there and you picked up the shovel, looked around you and said, “I guess I’ll start digging right here.”