best hoover dam documentary
Narrator: Their challenge was to harness the countrys wildest river, the mighty Colorado, to bring water, power and people to the Southwest. It was a brilliantly conceived scheme, uniting public works and private enterprise.
Narrator: The men of Six Companies would be gambling their money and their reputations. On the morning of November 13th, the nations media converged on Black Canyon to witness the historic attempt to re-route the Colorado.
The men of Six Companies went on to become some of the richest contractors in the world, and Frank Crowe took home a $350,000 bonus from the job.
Temperatures, 135, 140 degrees, in those diversion tunnels.
On March 4th 1931, Frank Crowe submitted Six Companies winning bid. Nevada State Museum and Historical Society
But the Bureau did begin laying rail and phone lines from Las Vegas out to Black Canyon. So my dad says if you come out I can getcha a job.
Narrator: A shiny new mess hall served 6,000 meals a day.
U.S. Geological Survey, Archival Photographs and Graphics On December 20th, 1922, a surveyor, J.G.
He cant hurt anybody..
And the intake towers sitting on the cliffs, way up above us. The federal government built Boulder City, an efficiently run, well-ordered company town, but dozens of tent cities sprang uphonky-tonk towns dotted the road from the dam to the small town of Las Vegas.
Workers moved the Colorado River from the bed it had known for 12 million years.
In 1905 the Colorado tore open the canal and flooded the valley, creating an inland sea across 150 square miles.
Narrator: By the summer of 1930, the government had not yet hired a contractor to build the Dam.
Hoover Dam was called one of the greatest engineering works in history. Jen Holmes
John Fordham
Heidi Bahnck Its like a chapel in a sense.
But it was the Depression, and many were grateful to have work. Maxine Riepen, Secretary, Employment Office: A man came in one time.
By dawn, the battle was won. Boulder City was essentially a government reservation, constructed under the jurisdiction of the Reclamation Service.
For two years, workerspoured concrete 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In 1935 the job was finished under budget and ahead of schedule. Richard Guy Wilson, Architectural Historian: They are modeled on Indian designs, Navajo pottery, symbols that look remarkably like the modern machine, the turbine, the gears that are all in motion.
And my mother and father didnt even have a tent.
And he took the banal details of the engineers that were in the original specifications and he turned it into one of the great modern landmarks of the 1930s. Narrator: The battle to conquer the Colorado soon turned deadly.
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. Narrator: That first summer the Six Companies payroll reached 1,400.
To accomplish this task they turned to Gordon Kaufmann.
Guy Louis Rocha, Nevada State Archivist: Carbon monoxide was knocking these men down, making them very, very ill.
Tommy Nelson The ancient river valley is long gone.
National Archives Rocky Mountain Region
And she says, I dont think Ill ever see you again.
It was just fantastic to watch all that going on.
A week later he stopped off at the dam site on his way from California to Washington. Guy Louis Rocha, Nevada State Archivist: Once the water was being bypassed, over that site, people came to worship in a way. T. H. Watkins, Author/Historian: It was a very, very important thing as symbol of what they felt could be done in a world that had gone all to hell.
He stayed only briefly, and left just hours before his beloved project faced its most crucial test. Now when you go over the dam it looks like the intake towers are right in the middle of the lake, you know, and, and the dam, you only see a small portion of it.
Her boss, Leonard Blood, reported that in its first three weeks his office had received 12,000 letters of inquiry.
Tommy Nelson, Worker: My first shift, was in one of the big diversion tunnels.
Archive Films
Before long the cables were delivering a concrete bucket every 78 seconds. 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. Boy, you should have heard them. They put me on the graveyard shift and I said to myself, I dont know whether I can take this or not, but Ill give it my all..
Davis, Photographer: Everybody took for granted that there was a job, might be a job available when they got there.
But the summer of 1931 was one of the hottest on record. The electrical transformers took on the look of a 1930s Buck Rogers space movie.
The temperature at the work site would routinely soar to above 120 degrees during the summer and plummet to well below freezing in the winter.
Getting in each others way.
When Ickes took office there were only twenty four African Americans in a 4,000 man work force. I think that he was quite embarrassed. Over the next two decades, floods would wipe out thousands of farmers.
Judy Irving Reel Orange Films Narrator: On December 20th, 1935, a worker named Patrick Tierney fell from an intake tower and drowned. Four tunnels, each 50 feet in diameter (which today could accommodate a 747 without the wings), were drilled through the solid rock walls of the Black Canyon.
Glenn Fukushima It was a part of me, I can assure you of that. After six days, the strike collapsed.
One hundred twelve died on the job, while extreme heat and working conditions brought illness or injury to uncounted others. The canyon fell strangely silent.
Its electricity spurred unprecedented growth.
But Six Companies, claiming the job was under federal jurisdiction, used them anyway. UNLVSpecial Collections, Songs After considering the concerns of all interested parties for the fair distribution of water for the seven states, Secretary Hoover drafted the Colorado River Compact.
The carbon monoxide was so thick a string of lights along the canyon wall looked like somebody striking matches. Greg Shea, Legal
He came by and says, Maxine, youre going to have to do the hiring today, Im going home. So they called in and wanted 90 laborers.
And the workers knew that.
If we are to survive and to grow, we must have the water that will enable us to maintain our mastery over the desert. The lucky ones were packed in tubs of ice water and survived.
Mark Mandler, Researchers
Ila Clements-Davey, Workers Daughter: Boulder City was run really very much like an army camp with great restrictions to what could go on and what couldnt go on, and a law enforcement that saw to it that these things were carried out. Imperial Irrigation District
AirWave Productions
Frank Crowe prowled the dam site day and night.
Workers collapsed from the heat, some with body temperatures as high as 112 degrees. You cant get the feeling of the immensity of the dam, and it looks a lot bigger from that side then it does from the face side. Thirty miles from Black Canyon, it was the only town anywhere near the dam site. The volatile Colorado constantly threatened the job. And, in the midst of the Great Depression, it was a symbol of hope for the dispossessed. Herbert Hoover Library And the streamlined spillways gave the huge mass a constant sense of motion. Nothing. Blaine Hamann, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: This was built in a time when it was the first big one. 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.
Dennis McBride Ila Clements-Davey, Workers Daughter: We got into what I call now the little puddle that was the lake at that time, and we went up to the back part of the dam and this great big structure this, oh my God big hunk of concrete, corkin up the Colorado River. Las Vegas was the mecca. It was just, you dumped the family out in the desert and thats it.
When they were taken to the hospital, the doctors would say, Its pneumonia! They would not say, Its carbon monoxide poisoning and Six Companies is responsible. They were saying, Its pneumonia were not responsible..
In Las Vegas, the waiting was finally over. Blood was sick well, hung-over is a better word, but anyway. W.A. Narrator: Crowe sent miners down the river to start the first and most dangerous phase of construction: the four diversion tunnels, two on each side of the river. The dam will be about. The heat was terrific, the noise was unbearable.
W.A.
Security was beefed up and a control gate installed, while Leonard Blood and his staff at the employment office began re-assembling the work force. Teatown Video, Production Assistants
And how the people on the swing shift slept, Ill never know.
In the neighborhood, I knew every single neighbor loved me.
Narrator: The buckets poured concrete into blocks five feet deep, that were stacked one on top of another in interlocking columns to form the dams structure. Los Angeles, its ever-sprawling metropolis, would be by far the single biggest customer. Man had moved the mighty Colorado from the bed it had known for 12 million years. Narrator: Nevada law prohibited gasoline powered trucks in the tunnels. Ickes pressure led to more minority hiring, but no blacks were allowed to live in Boulder City. Within hours, the entire work force went out on strike. Youd hear the blast and then see those guys fling themselves down there and start ripping the rocks off and there were people above them and people below them. In the West, a group of independent contractors formed a partnership they called Six Companies. Tierney, fell off a boat and drowned. By August, heat and dehydration had claimed fourteen lives.
Ila Clements-Davey, Workers Daughter: Everybody that came here was desperate or they left before they even got a job.
I couldnt remember sleeping that hammers werent going and stuff like that.
The major event in every workers life was payday. Keep the trucks movin, everybody movin. Davis, Photographer: That really went over like lead balloon. They had pretty much had their way with the project, until the New Deals own force of nature, Harold Ickes, took over as Secretary of the Interior.
Camera One Tommy Nelson, Worker: Two days off a year optional, without pay.
Working conditions were dangerous, pay was low, housing inadequate. It tamed a wild river and, for a time, renewed faith in American ingenuity and technology, Written, Produced and Directed by He made it a point that blacks should be considered as well as whites. And to come out and set up camp out in the desert was a pretty rough deal. Hiring may have opened up, but the dam remained a segregated workplace. Youve got an amphibious assault of these troops coming down on barges, cutting out landings like a beach landing in a World War II amphibious assault. Davis, Photographer: They built them rabbit hutches and called them houses. Whitsett, Chairman, Metropolitan Water District (archival): We here in Southern California, were building a great empire. Maxine Riepen, Secretary, Employment Office: One day, Mr. The town was overwhelmed. He would build four more dams, but Hoover Dam the name officially given it by Congress in 1947 stands as his crowning achievement.
Millions of dollars were lost. As to that structure down there, right to this day, I still feel like holding my hand over my heart when I go down there.
It was welcome news for a nation fallen on hard times.
Narrator: But as one resident put it to us, it was beautiful. In the unsettled world of the Depression, Boulder City offered families a security they hadnt known in years. Winding through Californias richly fertile Imperial Valley, the Colorado River was wildly unpredictableflooding in the spring, drying up in the summer.
Then, without warning, the river struck back. The man looked so dejected. Hoover Dam heralded the beginning of the modern industrial west.
Though legend claims otherwise, no workers were buried in the dams concrete. Davis, Photographer: A lot of these young men, they wasnt used to this heavy work, the environment. Five thousand men and their families settled in the Nevada desert. Sign up for the American Experience newsletter! Ila Clements-Davey, Workers Daughter: There was just nothing.
UCLAFilm & Television Archive Al M. Rocca, Crowe Biographer: He was wild to build that dam. Narrator: Architect Gordon Kaufmann, gave the dam its futuristic style. Amanda Libman
And of course there was a lot of miners in the background to tell him what a poor punk he was. Davis, Photographer: When I was lookin at the dam, I thought of the young men that had given up their lives to build the damned thing.
Then the staging would have to be taken down when they blew the face. Blaine Hamann, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: It looks like it could be some place on the moon.
Narrator: Frank Crowes workers were pouring more concrete in less time than anyone thought possible. And they were coming from anywhere and everywhere. People were so poor they couldnt afford to dance.
Narrator: Now they had to force the raging Colorado to change direction.
Joseph E. Stevens It hardly solved the unemployment problem, but it was a start.
Image Bank Davis, Photographer: You had to work seven days a week.
Edward Marritz
Dyanna Taylor, Location Sound The contractor never had it so good, because he had the pick of the nations best labor at the price he wanted to pay him.
Before work could start, the river had to be diverted.
So I did. Their exploits became legend real honest-to-goodness cliffhangers.
Blaine Hamann, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: Doggone, pretty tricky job.
People couldnt help but make the pilgrimage to this wonderful technological achievement. Narrator: Maxine Riepen was fresh out of Las Vegas High School when she got a job at the dams employment office. Single men moved into large dormitories, while row upon row of one, two and three room family cottages went up in a fury of sawdust and sand.
The steel and wood beast, called a drilling jumbo, carried three tiers of drills on a ten-ton truck.
Donald Wolf, Author/Engineer: There were many people who said it was physically impossible to build Hoover Dam, engineers who said that. Thirty-three stories high, they would deliver water from the reservoir to the power plants under construction below. You couldnt work five and a half days, which most people did. 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.
National Archives and Records Administration
The foreman come by and hed say Nelson go down the tunnel get a jackhammer, bring it up here and break up this rock. I hated to admit to him that I was so dumb.
Davis, Photographer: I loved that old river.
Carly La Pierre, Archival Footage
David B. Mooney As much as they were saying they were, they werent. And if you didnt like it, why theyd can you.
Jenni Matz, Historical Consultants
Man (archival): This is the site in the Black Canyon, picked first by Homer Hamlin in nineteen hundred and seventeen. T. H. Watkins, Author/Historian: One of the first things he did was to rename it Boulder Dam. Maxine Riepen, Secretary, Employment Office: I remember this big, strong-looking man fell.
Narrator: In one final flourish, the designers inlaid a celestial map to mark the exact position of the stars on the day of the Presidents dedication.
Vanessa Ezersky Ralph Pitrie
He would be the last man to die on the project, 13 years to the day after the first man diedJ.G.
But there was something beyond that. Its flood control and irrigation created some of Americas biggest farms and allowed them to flourish in the desert. Maxine Riepen, Secretary, Employment Office: There were hordes of men there, desperate men. Tommy Nelson, Worker: Ill tell ya I was pretty discouraged about the first night I put in.
The dam was moving so quickly, the Six Companies were not making the necessary provisions for safety. 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. The work never stopped three shifts a day, every day. Narrator: Frank Crowe had once been the Bureau of Reclamations Number One dam builder.
Grinberg Film Libraries, Inc. It was beautiful.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power He also was very, very irritated with the Six Companies in the way that blacks were discriminated against on the job, put a stop to discrimination in hiring.
That week, a steel bulkhead gate closed off the last diversion tunnel.
Susana Fernandes This was the biggest project that anybody had ever thought of.
On June 6th, 1933, after two years of preparation, workers finally poured the first bucket of concrete that would build the dams famous face. There was a certain comfort level you paid, but you gave up freedom for the comfort level. 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.
Tommy Nelson, Worker: The Six Companies foremen, they were on me all the time.
Blood did it, it looked like an old peoples home. But Hoover Dam also raised policy questions about the economic and environmental impact of large scale irrigation throughout the West.
And down where we were it was like 130 degrees.
Builders from around the country came to study Black Canyon.
The only way to harness this indispensable resource was to build a dam, which in turn would provide badly needed electricity to the western states. Theres nothin I can do for him. Library of Congress 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.
T. H. Watkins, Author/Historian: Hoover Dam changed the history of the West. Politics had been dominated in the East. 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.. Youd come out of there with a headache that wouldnt quit.
Narrator: Others moved farther out toward Black Canyon, to a deadly, desert place they called Ragtown.
Narrator: The Colorado was a river unlike any other dark and red with mud and silt from carving out the planets most magnificent canyons.
Blood took a look at him and says, Youre too old! He had a gruff voice and, uh, the man had white hair. An almost comic contraption turned out to be Frank Crowes best weapon against the tunnel deadline. Narrator: Six Companies also had to contend with a rigid government deadline two and a half years to divert the river or face steep fines for every day they ran late.
The engineering problems were stupendous, the solutions ingenious.
It was a modern, model community, free of the liquor and gambling that was Las Vegas stock-in-trade.
Al M. Rocca, Crowe Biographer: Theres no access there. President Roosevelt came to dedicate the Damtwo years ahead of schedule. Along comes a hard-boiled superintendent, and I told him theres a man killed over there.
His bosses at Six Companies stood firm.
National Archives and Records Administration
It was logistically one of the toughest things they did on the dam. Narrator: On September 30th, 1935, a crowd of 20,000 swarmed over what was being called the eighth wonder of the world.
What he loved best was gettin his boots muddy down in the river bottoms building dams.
Producers Library Service The start of construction on Hoover in 1930 held the promise of employment for thousands of workers in the Las Vegas area.
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.
I knew that.
Others there were two or three that fell to their death.
Davis, Photographer: Secretary Wilbur drove the spike, he missed it about three or four times. Narrator: Temperatures and tempers reached the kindling point on August 7th, 1931, when Six Companies re-assigned a number of workers to lower paying jobs.
Tommy Nelson, Worker: I should say I felt proud, 'cause I was a part of it.
Id swam the river, Id boated the river, Id taken people up the river on trips I felt bad to see it tamed, to tell you the truth.
The workers will have to work under our conditions, they said, or not at all. They rejected every worker demand and banished suspected union members.
Mr. Moonlight on the Colorado
I did because I was sitting there watching him all the time.
There was no facilities. He lost the 1932 election to Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide.
Blaine Hamann, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: There were things happening every second of every day down there.
Now, in a more environmentally-conscious age, many wish Hoover Dam had never been built.
Narrator: Las Vegas, of all places.
Written by Billy Moll and Robert King, Post Production
Eat 'em?
I didnt know what to expect. Folger Library, University of Maine, Orono Scott Kardel, Project Administration At sun up, the men would stagger back to Boulder City, and for the next fifteen days, Las Vegas went back to bed. Broadway Video, On Line Editor
Temporarily renamed Boulder Dam by the Roosevelt Administration, the projects electrical output helped build the ships and planes used in World War II; its water grew fruits and vegetables in California.
It was called the Boulder Canyon Project. On February 6th, 1935, the last bucket of concrete topped off the dam at 726 1/2 feet.
No way anyone with a colored skin could get in here.
Guy Louis Rocha, Nevada State Archivist: They were desperate for work.
Ila Clements-Davey, Workers Daughter: The men were just swarming over the whole place, they just looked like a hill of ants they really did. A commanding presence that made a lot of men feel like, wow, hes the boss. Narrator: For Herbert Hoover, the Depression had taken its toll.
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.
And all this incessant monstrous activity took place as if in a world taking shape before the dawn of man..
Get the trucks moving! Throughout the day, workers furiously dumped tons of rock into the rivers path, trying to build a barrier high enough and strong enough to push it back into the tunnels. Jay Fialkov Bureau of Reclamation, Lower Colorado Region
And some of those guys could chunk ten sandwiches in there, two pieces of pie, and maybe a couple of oranges. Most of the time it was something that would kill you or ruin your farm.
One of them was Herbert Hoover, the Secretary of Commerce, and a former engineer.
Bureau of Reclamation, Lower Colorado Region
To transport the concrete, Crowe designed an elaborate network of aerial cableways that carried material to almost anywhere on the dam site.
Negroes were not, there was no way a negro could get in here.
Narrator: The Dams new name would be a subject of dispute for the next seventeen years.
Its like the chapel of the machine age.
Tommy Nelson, Worker: Hot!
Patrick Ramirez, A Firstlight Pictures filmforAMERICANEXPERIENCE. Nothing but hard solid rock and deep canyon.
He transformed ordinary concrete surfaces into modern art deco designs.
Yet it stands as a monument to the ingenuity, and the sheer human will, that forever changed the face of America. For Frank Crowe, it was a personal triumph he had beaten the river, and his deadline, by eleven months. W.A.
Get the latest on new films and digital content, learn about events in your area, and get your weekly fix of American history. It has been compared to the Acropolis of Ancient Greece and the Coliseum of Imperial Rome. The power plants terrazzo floors recall the Native American heritage of the land. Blaine Hamann, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: Those diversion tunnels were unique. Diane Lee And the consequence is that they called in Gordon Kaufmann.
Film/Audio Services, Inc.
And I thought, heres my chance to get all these young boys that havent had a chance to go to work, to put their names up.
Narrator: The vast chasm seemed a slit through earth and time alike, wrote author Frank Waters.
This was their future. Colby Bryan
Ila Clements-Davey, Workers Daughter: It was like a movie of Tarzan, you know. Everything was just harsh, harsh, harsh.
It would form Lake Mead 115 miles long, 500 feet deep.
The landscape changed so rapidly that it was common for a man to come home after his shift and walk into the wrong house. Richard Guy Wilson, Architectural Historian: The Bureau of Reclamation realized that this was an epic-making construction.
W.P. In envisioning the architectural presentation of the dam, its designers wanted to make an impression of technological supremacy.
Narrator: In the beginning there were no roads.
To get them lined up, the job of drilling and shootin with dynamite, yknow, removing the rock. And he said to me, in no uncertain terms, What are you going to do with all these blankety-blank trucks? W.A.
Tierney, his father. Narrator: But Wilburs most lasting blow was struck in his closing remarks. Dennis McBride
Donald Wolf, Author/Engineer: He was a commander, a field commander.
Narrator: At the bottom of Lake Mead, 500 feet down, lie the remains of places like Ragtown. It wasabout the worst nightmare you could think of working in.
W.A. Tommy Nelson, Worker: I was playing with a dance band in Grand Junction, Colorado, practically starving to death, yknow.
Michael Becker
Ila Clements-Davey, Workers Daughter: They built communities very fast.
Christopher Beaver Martha Olsen
Franklin Roosevelt (archival): I have the right once more to congratulate you who have built Boulder Dam, and on behalf of the nation, to say to you: Well done..
And lo and behold I took a look up, and saw a high scaler way up high on the Nevada side comin down, and he fell very close to where I was standing. Al M. Rocca, Crowe Biographer: There were always cave-ins, there were always loose and sharp rocks falling about.
Drag lines, electric power shovels, trucks, men, dynamite, drills, noise, thunder, dust.
W.A. 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 projects official beginning. Because before, theyd have to put up staging. Davis, Photographer: That was a pretty clever idea. And when they went out, the foremen were making a joke out of it, saying that when I did the hiring, it looked like a college campus, but when Mr. Rising 726 feet above the raging waters of the Colorado River, it was called by the man whose name it bearsthe greatest engineering work of its character ever attempted by the hand of man. In fact, Hoover Dam reflected the engineering genius and design philosophy of the time.
But they had an ace in the holethe one man they believed could pull it offan engineer named Frank Crowe.
The jumbo could then be pulled away for blasting, and the whole operation moved to the next drilling area.
And that time he got a job.
John Choi, Assistant Editors
Work crews would have to drill and blast three-quarters of a mile through the canyon walls to open the holes that would carry the river around the work site.
The rank smell of Mesozoic ooze and primeval muck filled the air.
It had to be sold in Washington, DC, it had to be sold to Congress.
5,000 working men and their families came to live in the Nevada desert. Kelsey Dorwart
Narrator: By 1933, Six Companies was two years ahead of schedule and reported a profit of $3 million.
And then theyd have to replace it.
During the dam's construction, the job of the high scaler was by far the most dangerous.
Emery Kolb Collection, Cline Library, Northern Arizona University
Bechtel Corporation
The Fourth of July and Christmas.
