The Hoover Dam: The History and Construction of America’s Most Famous Engineering Project

*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the project written by workers and their family members *Includes a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "This morning I came, I saw, and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind…Ten years ago the place where we gathered was an unpeopled, forbidding desert. In the bottom of the gloomy canyon whose precipitous walls rose to height of more than a thousand feet, flowed a turbulent, dangerous river…The site of Boulder City was a cactus-covered waste. And the transformation wrought here in these years is a twentieth century marvel.” – President Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 30, 1935 During the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, thousands of workers began work on the Hoover Dam, built in the Black Canyon, which had been cut by the powerful Colorado River. The Colorado River was responsible for the Grand Canyon, and by the 20th century, the idea of damming the river and creating an artificial lake was being explored for all of its potential, including hydroelectric power and irrigation. By the time the project was proposed in the 1920s, the contractors vowing to build it were facing the challenge of building the largest dam the world had ever known. As if that wasn’t enough, the landscape was completely unforgiving, as described by the famous explorer John Wesley Powell generations earlier: “The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock--cliffs of rock, tables of rock, plateaus of rock, terraces of rock, crags of rock--ten thousand strangely carved forms…cathedral shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet, cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canyon walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast hollow domes and tall pinnacles and shafts set on the verge overhead; and all highly colored.” The engineering that went into the Hoover Dam was not just dangerous but unprecedented, to the extent that the Hoover Dam relied on building methods that had never been proven effective on such a giant scale. The project also had to employ tens of thousands of people in often dangerous working conditions, which resulted in scores of deaths. At the same time, however, the large number of men that traveled to work on the project helped turn Las Vegas, a nearby small desert town in Nevada, into Sin City. Despite all the difficulties, the Hoover Dam was completed on time, and President Roosevelt summed up just how impressive the accomplishment was in his speech dedicating the site in 1935: “We are here to celebrate the completion of the greatest dam in the world, rising 726 feet above the bedrock of the river and altering the geography of a whole region: we are here to see the creation of the largest artificial lake in the world-115 miles long, holding enough water, for example, to cover the whole State of Connecticut to a depth of ten feet; and we are here to see nearing completion a power house which will contain the largest generators and turbines yet installed in this country, machinery that can continuously supply nearly two million horsepower of electric energy." The Hoover Dam: The History and Construction of America’s Most Famous Engineering Project chronicles the construction of America’s most famous dam. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Hoover Dam like never before, in no time at all.