Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  WARREN BECHTEL

  Warren A. Bechtel grew up on a farm in Peabody, Kansas, at a time when he saw many men missing an arm or a leg from service in the Civil War. He was born in 1872, nine years after Henry Ford, and like Henry Ford, he hated farming. He liked tools and equipment and was said to be able to diagnose and fix any piece of mechanical equipment that broke. He disliked the tedium of farm animals, the dawn-to-dusk labor every day. His father, a German immigrant, owned a prosperous farm as well as a grocery store in the town of Peabody. Warren was fifteen years old when the first railroad train cut through the county. During high school summers, he did road construction work and learned how construction crews were organized and how machinery could cut the time of a job in half. Although he dated the founding of W. A. Bechtel Construction to 1898, when he was twenty-six, his actual equipment for the first years of his construction career consisted of two mules, a slip grader, and a strong back. Walking along behind two mules grading railroad bed was not so different from walking behind two mules plowing fields. When he arrived in Las Vegas in 1931, he saw men grading roadbed using the same kind of old-fashioned Fresno grader (invented in Fresno, California, for grading irrigation ditches). They were extending Fremont Street out into the desert for some thirty miles to the edge of the canyon of the Colorado River. By then, however, he was president of a large construction company that owned a lot of heavy equipment and one of the two senior partners in the Six Companies consortium. Like the Wattis brothers, he had never gone to college or engineering school.

  His first construction job was laying railroad track from southern Kansas into Indian Territory, soon to be known as Oklahoma. Known as a good manager who ran an organized construction site, he was promoted to supervising construction crews in Wyoming, working as a gang foreman, an estimator, supervisor of a shale quarry—all jobs that contributed to his understanding of materials, cost estimating, and how to write a contract to make a profit. Called a “natural engineer,” his talent in managing men, machinery, and money was a rare combination. By the time he got to Reno, Nevada, he was twenty-seven and married with two small sons, and the family lived in a converted railroad boxcar. (Today, a more luxurious version of the railroad car, called Watateeka, sits outside Bechtel world headquarters on Beale Street in downtown San Francisco, a reminder of the firm’s humble beginnings.) When his brother, Arthur, eleven years younger, joined him in 1897, Warren rented, and then bought, with the help of a loan from his father-in-law, one of the first steam shovels, a Model 10 Marion, the model developed for digging the Panama Canal. He had “W. A. Bechtel Co.” stenciled on the cab door and never looked back. He and his steam shovel were in demand largely for building railroad lines. But he also expanded into building bridges and dams, one of them, the Bowman Dam in the Sierra Nevada, the largest rock-filled dam in the West. Many of Warren Bechtel’s most lucrative jobs came as a subcontractor for the Wattis brothers. When he took on a partner, he chose Henry Kaiser, who had a sand and gravel business and was younger by ten years. By the time the Bechtel-Kaiser partnership became the largest investor in the Hoover Dam, the Bechtel family lived in a large Victorian house in Oakland, Mrs. Bechtel was on the board of the San Francisco Opera, and Warren Bechtel had four adult children, one of whom, Steven, was to become the full-time purchasing agent for Hoover Dam, a job second in importance only to that of the job superintendent, Frank Crowe.

  THE GREAT DEPRESSION

  Although Hoover Dam is generally believed to have been a great public works project of the New Deal administration during the Depression, it was actually a construction project built by private enterprise, funded by the government, and put in motion by the business-oriented Hoover administration to help the landowners of the Imperial Valley of Southern California. When the head of the Reclamation Bureau, Arthur Powell Davis, made his full report on the Colorado River to Congress, the report was officially titled “Report on Problems of Imperial Valley and Vicinity.”

  What made the Hoover Dam project different from any other construction project that any of the partners had ever worked on was that the entire country was in the depths of the Great Depression. The economy was stagnant, and the cost of materials had been cut in half. Labor was limitless. With a national unemployment rate of 25 percent, one out of every four workers was unemployed. People were living in their cars. Families had lost homes, jobs, and their savings, and they needed everything—housing, health care, schools, jobs. By 1931, the year construction started, more than ten thousand unemployed workers from across the country converged on Las Vegas to fight 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 every background—some in three-piece suits—from all over the country. Many arrived with families and children and were living in tents or cars if they had them. They set up tent colonies along Boulder Highway and shanties adjacent to the federal reservation where workers were housed (actually, workers were also in tents because housing was still being built). The unemployed patiently waited for someone to die or be fired.

  And during that first summer, as temperatures soared to more than 120 degrees and 130 degrees on the floor of Black Canyon and never went below 100 even at night, many did die. The medical teams did not know how to treat heat prostration or extreme dehydration. The stupefying heat was so relentless that workers could not replace the amount of water their bodies lost. Body temperatures went to 104 degrees, and workers went into comas. Even with the extreme summer heat, men tried to sneak into the dam site to ask for employment. Every worker had to have an official pass, or else they were turned away at the gate and told to apply at the main office in Las Vegas.

  One desperate but resourceful unemployed father cut the small rectangular photo label off the front of his son’s cereal box because the design was similar to a worker’s identification pass. He hitched a ride down Boulder Highway to the job site with four employed workers and flashed the cereal-box cutout when the guard at the gate peered through the car windows and scanned their identification. The guard nodded and waved them all through. With a wife and four children, the youngest nine months, living in a tent along Boulder Highway, he didn’t leave the job site until he had attached himself to a crew, been hired, and been given a real pass.

  Organized crime figures already ran illegal gambling in Reno and Carson City, but advocates for legal gambling argued that it would provide an important source of recreation for the dam workers as well as revenue for the state. Gambling and prostitution were a fact of life in Nevada’s hundreds of mining towns. No one thought in terms of legality or illegality. And even though the Volstead Act was still in effect, Prohibition was barely enforced in Nevada.

  As the Great Depression deepened, unemployment in America continued to grow. America had 98 million people, less than a third of its population today, and a fourth of its workers were unemployed. Las Vegas became a magic name, the one place in the country where that elusive element called “a job” still existed. Thousands made their way to Las Vegas, by bus, train, car.

  TONY CORNERO

  Tony Cornero arrived in Las Vegas in 1931, the same year as Warren Bechtel, except that he came directly from prison. Cornero’s real name was Anthony Stralla, and he was a talented promoter and liquor “wholesaler.” He was also smart, a sharp dresser, and ambitious. Based in Los Angeles, he supplied Las Vegas clubs with good-quality imported liquor that he got from Mexico and Canada. Known for “the real stuff,” not the liquor made in local stills or Las Vegas bathtubs, Tony Stralla Cornero was also known by the nickname of Admiral Cornero because he brought liquor in by boat from Mexico or Canada, transferring it into smaller boats before dawn and then unloading the cargo in small coves along the coast. The liquor went by truck to the many local saloons in Las Vegas, where it was said that every second or third building on Fremont Street was a sawdust saloon or a gambling hall—the Golden Camel, the Nevada Club, the Tivoli Bar, the La S
alle Club, the Barrel House, the Silver Club. If the club’s owner paid off the local sheriff—“dues” rather than a bribe—there was no problem with Prohibition enforcement. The only problem came when federal officers came to town.

  Tony Cornero was ahead of his time. Although author James Roman called him “the original wise guy,” he also was a good businessman with a vision of a high-class establishment for the visitors who would come to Las Vegas to see the dam construction. He wanted to build not only a hotel and a casino and nightclub but an airstrip that would bring a wealthy clientele to Las Vegas to gamble. He wanted to bring Los Angeles nightclub acts to Las Vegas. The luxurious Arizona Biltmore hotel had opened in the empty desert outside of Phoenix in 1929 and was attracting many wealthy Hollywood people to its private gambling and entertainment. Planes made it possible.

  As a convicted felon—Tony had been arrested during the unloading of one of his Mexican-rum import operations—he was ineligible for a license. His brothers, Frank and Louis Stralla, secured one of Las Vegas’s first gambling licenses, and Cornero named the place the Meadows. He and his brothers bought land outside the Las Vegas city limits at the intersection of East Sahara and Boulder Highway on the theory that it was a location where they could attract visitors going both to and from the dam as well as regulars from Las Vegas.

  The Meadows opened in May 1931, and according to John Cahlan, who attended the launch, “It set the stage for all future openings in the city of Las Vegas.” Everyone was expected to wear a tuxedo, even though “there were very few people outside the Las Vegas Elks Lodge who had tuxes. So there was a grand scurrying to get the tuxes in for the opening.” The Meadows was the classiest place in Las Vegas, a social center for the locals and the place where the executives from the dam project went for recreation.

  Another Las Vegas resident, Thomas Wilson, remembered a New Year’s party the Stralla brothers invited him to. “They sent me an invitation to their black-tie New Year’s party. The youngest brother Louis, introduced me to his guests, his brothers, some of the gals in the chorus . . . and then he said ‘I gotta identify you, right?’ And he drew with a pencil a badge on my shirtfront and put ‘U.S. Prohi’ [federal Prohibition officer] lettered on the shield. They thought this was funnier than hell! I had a wonderful time—all the scotch in the world, all the champagne in the world—all these crazy characters. . . . It was sort of like being on the set of a grade B gangster movie.” Local business and civic leaders expressed appreciation for the new business and sponsored a ten-page supplement about the Meadows in the local newspaper: “Potent in its charm, mysterious in its fascination, The Meadows, America’s most luxurious casino, will open its doors tonight and formally embark upon a career which all liberal-minded persons in the West will watch closely.”

  Tony Cornero introduced a few other innovations. He used silver dollars rather than chips at the gambling tables. He said that if anybody tried to heist them, they couldn’t get away with much because a bag of silver dollars weighed too much.

  He was prescient in seeing possibilities in Las Vegas that were different from the dusty construction site that it was at the time. He built the landing strip for small planes that did bring many wealthy people from Los Angeles. He brought in showgirls from Los Angeles and launched a popular nightclub act and entertainment. And he experimented with air-conditioning. As the Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote in a profile of Cornero, “He saw a Las Vegas of classy, carpeted casinos, quite distinct from the tiny places with sawdust on the floor, which opened after the gambling bill was signed into law.”

  Yet there were problems. Four months after the opening, the hotel part of the Meadows complex burned down. Because the building was outside the city limits, the fire department got to the city line and wouldn’t go any farther. There was no county fire department. Then a story emerged that Cornero had made a deal with members of the leading law firm in town to arrange for the closing of Block 16, where all the brothels were located, so that Cornero would have the monopoly on prostitution at the Meadows. That did not happen. Block 16 remained the prostitution district of Las Vegas. Then another story went around that the fire was arson because Cornero refused to pay protection money to Meyer Lansky’s syndicate that controlled the racing wire in Las Vegas.

  Tony Cornero left his brothers to run the Meadows and went back to California and opened two of the hugely profitable gambling boats that operated outside the three-mile limit off Santa Monica Pier. When law enforcement agencies closed the gambling boats in the 1940s, he came back to Las Vegas, worked at the Apache Club, and began putting together the money and backing to build the Stardust casino-resort.

  A DEADLY WORK SITE

  At the dam site construction surged forward, even before there was any housing constructed for the workers. Warren Bechtel had negotiated significant performance incentives into their contract. The faster they finished key phases of the dam, the larger the bonus they earned. Six Companies also had much lower costs than originally estimated. It was the depth of the Depression, and the cost of labor, materials, and equipment had fallen through the floor. For every cubic yard of earth excavated, the government contract paid $8, while the actual cost to the builder was $5.50. The contract stipulated $850 reimbursement for the houses built for the workers; it cost Six Companies $145. The workers were paid $4 a day instead of the $5.50 that had been estimated. The final contract called for nonunion labor and barred Asian (Chinese) workers.

  Thousands of unemployed workers converged on Las Vegas to apply for construction jobs. Along with the miners and construction crews they expected to hire, the Six Companies employment office saw men in suits, men with families, men who had no construction experience whatsoever. Some took jobs with Union Pacific, grading railroad bed and building the thirty miles of railroad track that would carry materials and equipment to the dam site. They laid track to the edge of the canyon and then blasted six miles of switchbacks out of the canyon walls to bring the track down to water level. Others built the concrete plant on the Arizona side of the river, where the concrete would be mixed with aggregate and shipped by truck to the dam site. (The concrete plant is now underneath Lake Mead, and boaters say the old smokestacks of the plant are starting to poke through to the surface and nudge unlucky boaters.) Others got jobs at Boulder City, where housing for the workers and dam executives was being built. Experienced miners were able to get jobs blasting out the diversion tunnels on either side of the canyon in order to reroute the river and create a dry dam site on the floor of the canyon almost a mile long.

  In August 1931 some fourteen hundred workers, almost two-thirds of the workforce at that point, threatened to strike. Workers on the canyon floor were surrounded by thousand-foot walls of solid black rock that absorbed the sun’s heat. Temperatures during the day went as high as 130 degrees. The workers wanted free ice water on the floor of the canyon (they had water, but had to pay for ice water) and $5 a day in pay instead of $4, half of which was deducted in advance to pay for meals and lodging. (The pay scale ranged from $3.50 a day to $6 for truck drivers, welders, and skilled machine operators. Unskilled labor was at the bottom of the scale.) The workers also demanded payment in real money, not company scrip. Scrip, company paper usable only at Six Companies stores, was a common practice, but illegal on federal contracts. The workers wanted helmets instead of baseball caps that that been coated with hardened tar, because a pebble that fell from the top of the canyon to a worker at the bottom gained enough velocity to kill or cripple him. Frank Crowe, as project superintendent, fired all fourteen hundred men in the morning and began hiring a new workforce the same afternoon. The labor pool was bottomless.

  In San Francisco W. H. Wattis called a press conference from his room at St. Francis Hospital, where he was still being treated for cancer, and attributed the strike to the work of communists and the hated Wobblies (International Workers of the World). As quoted in the San Francisco Examiner, Wattis declared, “They will work under our conditions or they
will not work at all.” There would be no unions tolerated at Black Canyon. Although Wattis died the following month, no unions took hold at the dam site. Anyone advocating for a union was soon fired and run off the job site.

  Ten months into the construction, the Nevada superintendent of mines cited Six Companies for illegal practices such as using gasoline-fired engines in unventilated closed spaces and for returning men to the diversion tunnels in fifteen minutes instead of sixty after dynamite blasts. Warren Bechtel soon showed up with a lawyer and said they weren’t a mining operation, so Nevada mining laws weren’t applicable. The air in the unventilated tunnels was thick with carbon monoxide from the idling trucks. Many truck drivers who cleared debris from the tunnels became ill from carbon monoxide poisoning, a potentially fatal lung disease that the company denied and instead called “pneumonia.” The ill workers, who claimed that the toxic gases in the tunnels were worse than coal mines, were soon fired or laid off. Although more than a hundred workers died on the job, from heatstroke, falls, explosions, or being struck by heavy equipment, no one was listed as dying from “pneumonia.” Six Companies settled at least fifty cases of carbon monoxide poisoning out of court.

  Warren Bechtel succeeded Wattis as president of Six Companies, and his son Steven took over as vice president. Steven Bechtel, later known as Steve Sr., was in charge of purchasing, a job that controlled expenditures of $10 million and was second in importance to that of Frank Crowe, the overall project superintendent. The prominence of the Bechtels, father and son, contributed to credit going to the Bechtel Company after the project’s completion. Warren Bechtel also died before the dam was finished, which placed Steven Bechtel in a position of greater authority. “Hoover Dam,” said Steven Bechtel years later after he became president of Bechtel, Inc., “put us in a prime position as being big-time thinkers, real thinkers.”