Desperate Times: The Building of the Hoover Dam

Page 2 of 7

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Ragtown
• 3. Surviving Ragtown
• 4. Working life
• 5. Fighting for progress
• 6. Completion
• 7. Find out more
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Ragtown

What these people found when they arrived on the muddy banks of the Colorado was Ragtown, a vast squatter settlement sprawled across the desert floor. Known officially as Williamsville, after Claude Williams, the US deputy marshal in charge of the place, it was more appropriately known as Hell's Hole.

Boulder City, the company town that had been planned to house the Hoover dam's construction workers, had not yet been built, so Ragtown was the only place that anyone could live that was close enough to the work site. Murl Emery, who owned a small store and tourist facility nearby, recalls the crowds of people he watched moving in. As he reports:

'People came with their kids ... They came with everything on their backs. Their cars had broke down before they got here and they walked. No one helped them. The government would have nothing to do with them.'

At night, when some of the newcomers arrived, Ragtown seemed a charming spot: the air was filled with the scent of wild water and wet rock, while the light from campfires and Coleman lanterns glimmered through the creosote and cactus. But when the sun rose, the picture was very different. Velma Holland came to the town early in 1931. She remembers:

'We left Las Vegas and came out to the river. The moon was shining and that river was the most beautiful silver strand you ever saw. We got up the next morning, I looked out ... and it was awful - tents, big wood-coloured stuff that had looked so beautiful the night before in the moonlight.'

The rising sun also brought another scourge - that of heat. The spring and summer of 1931 was the hottest on record: on 24 July 1931, Ragtown's temperature in the midday sun rose to 143 degrees. 'Sometimes you'd feel like you couldn't get your breath', says Helen Holmes. 'At night it was so hot you had to wet sheets to be able to rest, because you just couldn't sleep.'

Erma Godbey and her family came to Ragtown in June 1931, and pitched camp while her husband, Tom, looked for work. As Erma remembers it:

'It would get to be 120 degrees by nine in the morning and it wouldn't get below 120 before nine at night. You could see the heat dancing off the cliffs. For my littlest baby, the one that was only five months old, I would put a wet sheet around her crib so the air would blow through it. But it wasn't enough.'

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Published: 2003-09-23