Working life
'Construction crews were not large this early in the project, and most of the available jobs were dangerous, dirty, and low-paid.'
Work on the tunnels that would eventually divert the Colorado River away from the construction site began in May 1931, and provided work for hundreds of men. But because the contractor, Six Companies, used petrol-driven trucks and machinery in the tunnels, workers had to breathe carbon monoxide day in, day out, while they worked for their meagre $4-a-day wage.
'We could tell by looking at the lights in the tunnel,' remembers former labourer Curley Francis. 'If they had a big blue ring around them, we would know the gas was getting pretty rough in there.'
John Gieck, who worked a graveyard shift in the tunnels, went in one night with a crew of 17 men. 'The next morning,' he says, 'myself and three others was all that was left - all the rest was taken out sick.'
Even Murl Emery, whose boats carried workers from Ragtown into Black Canyon, was called upon to lead a rescue operation when dozens of men were taken ill with carbon monoxide poisoning. As he remembers, 'They were hauling men out of those tunnels like cord wood.'
Many of the jobs on the Hoover Dam project had strange and exotic names: truck drivers were known as double-uglies; while those who worked with electricity were called juicers. Bosses were called easy-doughs, and the most menial workers, those who scraped up and removed the mud and debris in the tunnel bottoms, were known as muckers. Carpenters were wood-butchers, signal punks helped guide the cableways, and dinky skinners ran small electric locomotives, called dinky engines, between the concrete batching plant and the edge of the canyon.
But the most glamorous and highly paid workers on the dam project were the high scalers, who worked out in the fresh air and sun, suspended like spiders hundreds of feet above the canyon floor. High scalers were the men who scaled, or pried away, loose rock and boulders from the canyon walls after blasting. They swung on ropes and bosun chairs like acrobats from site to site on the canyon wall wherever they were needed.
'They hired anyone who didn't have brains enough to be scared,' says Jake Dieleman. 'You was 700 feet up in the air. It took a lot of guts.'
'But it was a good job,' recalls former high-scaler Joe Kine. 'I think there was less people that got hurt on high scaling than there was on lots of other jobs.'
Published: 2003-09-23