The Dam That Remade the West, Hoover Dam and the Colorado, Nineteen Thirty-One to Thirty-Six

Before the dam, the Colorado River was a problem with a continent behind it. It flooded without warning. It shifted course.

It delivered silt that choked irrigation canals in the Imperial Valley and overwhelmed the farms of the lower desert. Seven states shared its water, argued about it constantly, and agreed on almost nothing. The river was used and feared in roughly equal measure.

The Bureau of Reclamation began construction at Black Canyon, on the Nevada-Arizona border, in March of nineteen thirty-one, the same month Nevada legalized gambling, a coincidence worth noting. Six Companies, Incorporated, a consortium of large western contractors, won the construction bid at just under forty-nine million dollars. They began by building Boulder City, a planned government town in the desert, to house the workforce.

Before Boulder City was ready, thousands of workers lived in a shantytown on the river bank called Ragtown, in one hundred and nineteen degree summer heat, cooling themselves in the muddy Colorado. More than fifty-two hundred workers were on site at peak construction. The official death toll was ninety-six.

Workers and their advocates disputed that number, arguing that deaths from carbon monoxide exposure in the diversion tunnels were classified as pneumonia to avoid liability. The historical record on this point remains contested. The dam was dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt on September thirtieth, nineteen thirty-five, two years ahead of schedule.

It was at that moment the largest dam in the world and the largest hydroelectric installation ever built. It created Lake Mead, still the largest reservoir in the United States by volume. It made Phoenix possible.

It made Los Angeles's growth possible. It made Las Vegas possible in ways the nineteen thirty-one gambling bill alone never could have. Boulder City, the only Nevada city built by the federal government, still bans gambling today.

Some ironies take a while to appreciate.