by Sally Denton
There were actually eight companies represented at the meeting: Henry J. Kaiser Co. of Oakland; W. A. Bechtel Co. of San Francisco; Morrison and Knudsen of Boise, Idaho; the Wattis brothers from Utah Construction Co. of Ogden; MacDonald & Kahn Co., Inc., of San Francisco; J. F. Shea Co. Inc. of Los Angeles; Pacific Bridge Co. of Portland, Oregon; and General Construction Co. of Seattle. But when it came time to naming their group, Kaiser insisted on calling it Six Companies, borrowing the name from the six tongs of San Francisco’s Chinatown—the Chinese crime families’ equivalent of the Mafia that mediated clashes between rival factions. “Hocking everything but their shirts, they could barely scrape together the few million dollars they would need to buy enough equipment to begin the job,” Reisner, the renowned American environmentalist and water management expert, described the dubiousness of the venture. Each of the eight firms was required to put up $500,000 toward the bond. The $1.5 million contributed by Bechtel and Kaiser combined gave them a resounding 30 percent equity in the project. Six Companies Inc. was incorporated in Delaware, just two weeks before the bids were to be submitted.
Symbolic of all that was right and wrong with America, Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover Dam in 1947) created the water and energy infrastructure that would power the rest of the century’s burgeoning development in the American West. Sunbelt metropolises never before envisioned—Los Angeles, Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego—would become a sudden, slightly daunting reality. The central thrust of the massive population shift from the East to the West depended upon the control of water and energy, and Bechtel would be firmly installed as a powerbroker in exploiting the western resources of water, coal, uranium, oil, and gas. Depicted throughout as a New Deal Depression-era public works project, the dam was in reality a government-funded private enterprise “put in motion by the business-oriented Hoover administration to help the landowners of the Imperial Valley of Southern California,” according to Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West, by Judith Nies. The journey to Hoover Dam had begun in the early 1920s, when a burgeoning California set its sights on the Colorado River as a source of both water and electricity. More than half of the entire American West’s ten million population lived in California, and even though the state’s tributaries contributed little to the Colorado River, the voracious developers of San Diego and Los Angeles began pushing Congress to authorize a dam that would primarily benefit California. Most of the water and nearly two-thirds of the hydroelectricity generated by the dam would go to light up Los Angeles and make California the wealthiest state in the country. Developers and political leaders in the other six riparian states were outraged by the blatant water grab—especially Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah, which collectively contributed more than 83 percent of the runoff.
On November 24, 1922, representatives of all seven states—including New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona—had met at a dude ranch on the outskirts of Santa Fe to divvy up the river’s annual estimated 17.5 million acre-feet of water. Then–US commerce secretary Herbert Hoover, longtime promoter of public-private partnerships in the name of what he called “economic modernization,” brokered the contentious gathering. That night, in the Ben Hur Room of the Palace of the Governors, they finally applied their signatures to the negotiated Colorado River Compact that separated the river basin into “upper” and “lower” divisions, arbitrarily partitioned at Lees Ferry, Arizona. The compact allotted 7.5 million acre-feet to each segment, with whatever was left a sop to Mexico. The state legislatures in seven state capitals bickered, and eastern politicians on Capitol Hill railed against allocating millions for a project in the hinterland. Finally, six years later, Congress took control and authorized construction of a dam, and hydrologists and geologists for the US Interior Department stepped up their exploration for a site on the lower Colorado.
For a quarter century, Frank T. Crowe had envisioned backing up the Colorado River near the walls of Black Canyon. A legendary engineer, Crowe was often compared with George Washington Goethals, the hard-driving army officer who oversaw the building of the Panama Canal. The six-foot-three Crowe was “wild to build this dam, the biggest dam ever built by anyone anywhere,” he told a magazine writer. “I had spent my life in the river bottoms, and Boulder meant a wonderful climax—the biggest dam ever built by anyone anywhere.” Born in Quebec in 1882, Crowe had studied civil engineering at the University of Maine. So eager was he to jump-start his dam-building career that he skipped his 1904 commencement and hurriedly joined the US Reclamation Service. Over the next twenty years, he built dams in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, all the while maneuvering to become the contractor for the world’s largest dam. Cultivating contacts within both the public and private sectors, he immersed himself in the early design work. He wanted to go down in history as the greatest dam builder in the world.
By 1924, Crowe had become the general superintendent of construction for the Bureau of Reclamation. But he eagerly left the government to join Six Companies, where he would become the consortium’s secret weapon. As a former government insider, the man whose motto was “Never my belly to a desk” knew the bureau’s bidding process and was acquainted intimately with all 119 of the complicated specifications for the dam. He also possessed inside technological information unknown by rival bidders that could radically reduce traditional construction costs and guarantee sizeable profits to the partnership. He crafted the consortium bid to total $48,890,955—coincidentally just $24,000 more than government engineers had calculated and a whopping $10,000,000 below the highest bid. Not surprisingly, on March 4, 1931, the bureau awarded the contract to Six Companies, whose offer—as Crowe well knew—was the lowest among the three competing bids. Such preciseness of a bid had never been seen before in construction history in the American West.
Despite congressional grumbling, the government ultimately did not begrudge what were astronomical profits for the era. “When the last bills are paid and the turbines begin to turn, the Six Companies will have turned a profit estimated at $7 million and upward for all their work,” Fortune magazine wrote. “The U.S. is willing to pay a good profit for a good dam built rapidly.” At $165 million, the Boulder Canyon Project Act—signed into law by President Hoover—would be the largest congressional appropriation in American history until that time.
“In All the President’s Men, Deep Throat tells [Washington Post reporter Bob] Woodward to ‘follow the money,’ ” according to authors Peter Wiley and Robert Gottlieb. “For the Southwest, it is a question of following the water, the resources, the migratory trails. Where they lead tells us not only about the Southwest but about the future direction of the United States,” the two wrote in their definitive Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West.
CHAPTER THREE
Hobo Jungle
Built at the height of the Great Depression, under the most harrowing and inhumane conditions, by the country’s hungriest men, Hoover Dam was a towering metaphor for the overwhelming challenges facing a desperate nation. Conceived by a river runner, designed by a civil engineer, facilitated by an indecisive president and hostile Congress, brutally micromanaged by an arrogant contractor, overseen by a handful of calculating corporate titans, and built by circus acrobats and Indian skywalkers, the feat was a historic convergence of implausible circumstances. A marvel of design, engineering, architecture, and construction, it stands as a stark emblem of humanity’s conquest over nature, if not the subjugation of the American frontier.
The government’s plan called for Six Companies to move ten million cubic yards of rock in order to build the largest hydroelectric power plant in the world, create a massive reservoir, and erect an entire town to house and provide services for thousands of workers. Many scientists believed it could not be accomplished—that the six-million-ton structure placed between two earthquake fault lines in the canyon floor and lodged between two vertical rock walls would never be stable. Naysayers feared that the weight of the lake created by the dam would provoke ma
ssive tremors and “unleash a flood of biblical proportions.” One engineer recalled, “We were all scared stiff.”
A week after Six Companies won the bid, Crowe took the Union Pacific Railroad to dusty Las Vegas, Nevada—a remote desert town inhabited by five thousand souls. By the time he stepped off the train, Crowe, “like a general preparing for a major battle, had planned his strategy,” wrote historian Al M. Rocca in America’s Master Dam Builder: The Engineering Genius of Frank T. Crowe. “The enemy, notorious Black Canyon, arrayed an impressive list of natural obstacles.” Having been designated chief engineer on the project, he drove to the isolated dam site thirty miles to the southeast. The “road” consisted of two vanishing tracks through the sand. “When one set of tracks grew too soft to follow, cars simply moved over a few feet and forged a new trail,” he described it according to dam historian Dennis McBride.
Crowe understood that the job would require an army of men and machines, and that maximizing profits would depend upon the skilled management of both. “He knew it would take the best in heavy equipment: tractors, dump trucks, shovels, jackhammers, drills, and concrete buckets,” wrote Rocca, his biographer. “And what about his army? Who would serve in Frank Crowe’s army?” He would be shocked to see that thousands of unemployed men had already made their way to Las Vegas from every corner of the country, hoping to be the first applicants when the hiring began.
America had hit rock bottom, the national unemployment rate soaring to 25 percent. One out of every four heads of household were out of work. Millions wandered from state to state in search of a job, and when word spread of the dam construction, they poured into Nevada in droves. Within weeks, more than ten thousand prospective workers were loitering around the train depot and the temporary Six Companies headquarters in downtown Las Vegas, resembling what one account called a “hobo jungle.” They would compete for fifteen hundred jobs. “Instead of the young miners they expected to hire, the Six Companies employment office in Las Vegas faced long lines of workers of every age and background—some in three-piece suits—from all over the country,” according to one report. “Many arrived with families and children and were living in tents or cars if they had them . . . The unemployed patiently waited for someone to die or be fired.”
“This will be a job for machines,” Crowe told the New York Times, emphasizing that the scale and development of modern machinery would set the project apart from anything previously constructed in America. Mack engineers built the largest truck ever—a huge 250-horsepower vehicle capable of moving 16 cubic yards of earth. General Electric constructed the most sophisticated X-ray unit of its time to photograph 24 million square inches of pipe welding. Lidgerwood Manufacturing produced steel ropes three and a half inches in diameter capable of lowering 150 tons of concrete or steel into the construction pit. The most ingenious invention of all would be a motor-driven rig set on a 10-ton chassis that supported four massive platforms carrying thirty 144-pound rock drills. Becoming the project’s historic signature device, it enabled the workers to drill and place dynamite and then drive away before the explosion.
The first challenge at the dam site was the most complex and treacherous: diverting the Colorado through four tunnels, two on each bank, that would draw the river off its course and leave the original riverbed dry for construction. Workers drilled and dynamited through 3.5 million tons of volcanic rock to build the tunnels—each three-quarters of a mile long and, at 56 feet, as wide as a four-lane highway. Three feet of concrete, manufactured a mile upstream at a plant erected by Six Companies, lined each tunnel, which was capable of carrying 200,000 cubic feet of water per second. Barges transported generators, jackhammers, and air compressors to the site, access roads and railroads were built, and power lines were strung. Workers raised a 98-foot-high cofferdam on the Nevada side, 600 feet downriver from the inlet portals of the diversion tunnels.
On November 13, 1932, the entrances and exits of the two Arizona tunnels were blasted open, and, within seconds, a convoy of more than a hundred trucks began dumping loads of rock and muck into the river’s path. The next morning, the river finally abandoned its long-worn course and gushed into the shiny new tunnels. Still, work continued for another year. A second 66-foot cofferdam was built downstream before the engineers turned their attention to the 700-foot concrete dam and began digging down to bedrock to lay the foundation. One and a half million cubic yards of silt and gravel were dredged and hauled away, and more than six thousand sticks of dynamite were fired before striking bedrock at 139 feet below the surface of the river. The solid-rock river bottom was pumped dry through a network of pipes in preparation for the concrete-pouring phase of the famous convex arch.
In June 1933 a giant bucket suspended from a cable spanning the gorge dumped the first load of 60 million tons of concrete that would form the dam’s iconic streamlined face. The “pour” went on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for nine months, with a bucketful dropping every seventy-eight seconds. Crews simultaneously built two giant spillways, four intake towers, penstocks to carry water from the intakes to the turbines, 222 miles of electricity transmission lines from the dam to Southern California, and diversion tunnels to control irrigation to California’s lush Imperial Valley farms.
On January 31, 1935, a steel bulkhead gate weighing more than a thousand tons was lowered onto the canyon floor, closing off the fourth and final diversion tunnel. The Colorado River, now barred from its ancestral path, began pooling behind the futuristic monolith. Completed two and a half years ahead of schedule, using 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete, Hoover Dam glared white against the desert canyons. “The structure spanned ideology as it spanned Black Canyon,” wrote historian Roger Morris, “joining public purpose and private enrichment in a marriage the West . . . took for granted.”
CHAPTER FOUR
That Hellhole
Just as the construction statistics were significant and legendary, so too was the human toll. The safety violations and labor unrest that characterized Hoover Dam’s construction site would become synonymous with Bechtel over the coming decades, dogging the company all the way into the next century and earning for Dad Bechtel the reputation as the “bête noir [sic] of American labor,” wrote Laton McCartney. Corporate profits were astronomical, as Frank Crowe kept the project moving way ahead of schedule, with workers paying the price. Crowe’s worksite “resembled a battlefield on the eve of the clash of armies,” wrote Michael Hiltzik.
Frustrated by conflicting orders from Six Companies partners, Crowe threatened to quit at one point, prompting the bosses to form an executive committee headed by Bechtel. Installed like a pasha in a sumptuous Spanish colonial–style hacienda high above the scorching construction site, the hulking Bechtel—along with son Steve—summoned Crowe to informal “board meetings” that he held every Saturday afternoon during a pinochle game. Steve had become vice president of Six Companies and was in charge of purchasing and expenditures. The cost of labor, materials, and equipment had plummeted as the Depression deepened, swelling the profit margin greatly. The government contract paid $8 for every cubic yard of earth excavated, while the actual cost to Six Companies was $5.50. The contract provided $850 reimbursement for each house built in Boulder City—the government-sponsored community for dam workers and their families—but the company built them for $145. The project had proceeded so far ahead of schedule that by early 1932, Six Companies had recovered its $5 million surety bond and “pocketed an additional $1 million in contract incentives,” according to one account.
More than twenty-one thousand famously taut and muscled men had worked on the dam as miners, nippers (steel cutters who ran the drills over to the miners), chuck tenders (drill placers), muckers (unskilled laborers who removed dynamite debris), shovel operators, cat skinners (bulldozer operators), electricians, and powder men (dynamite placers). High scalers performed the most audacious tasks, rappelling along the sheer cliffs, stripping them clean of any loose rocks and scree fields
that often broke loose and killed workers below. The walls needed to be totally clean where the concrete dam and the canyon would meet. No cranes could adequately remove all of the debris, so the job was left to the four hundred high scalers, who quickly gained the reputation as fearless acrobatic show-offs. Held only by slender ropes, they scrambled across the towering walls like monkeys, carrying their tools and water bags. Once suspended in their swing-like seats bolted to the rock, they pulled out forty-four-pound jackhammers, drilled holes, and inserted dynamite. Former sailors, ironworkers, and circus performers, their daredevil showmanship and athletic contests irked Crowe, whose hotheaded and demanding nature left little room for humor.
Called “Hurry-up Crowe” for the breakneck speeds he demanded in order to maximize profits for Bechtel and fellow corporate bosses, he pushed his laborers hard in summer temperatures that averaged from 120 to 130 degrees on the floor of Black Canyon. As Reisner wrote, “Besides the hazards of the construction work (the falling rock, the explosives, electrocution, behemoth machines), besides the hazards of off-hours (fist fights, drunken binges, social diseases from the whores who camped about); besides all this, there was the heat.” With no shade and little fresh drinking water, body temperatures rose high enough to push men into comas. In one five-day period alone, fourteen workers died from heat prostration. It was not until a visiting team of Harvard University physiologists came to the site in the summer of 1932 that dehydration was identified as a leading cause of death. The diversion tunnels often reached a smothering 140 degrees and were thick with carbon monoxide, resulting in many deaths. Six Companies deliberately misdiagnosed these deaths as pneumonia to skirt legal culpability.
Almost daily, the wives and children ensconced in nearby Boulder City heard ambulances heading to the dam site. “That siren—oh, it scared you ’cause you wondered if it might be your husband,” recalled the wife of a pipe fitter whose heat stroke rendered him nearly unconscious. Six Companies did not provide first aid or medical service on the canyon floor as the human misery and death rate rose. Instead, Crowe drove his men harder, with three shifts working around the clock, seven days a week.
