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Desperate Times: The Building of the Hoover Dam

By Dennis McBride

It was started in a mire of misery and personal tragedy, but the Hoover Dam stands today as an inspiring example of human ingenuity. And many of those who struggled to build it regard it with great pride, as Dennis McBride - who knows many of them - explains.

President Herbert Hoover, who presided over the early years of the Depression

Introduction

There had never been a more desperate time in the United States. With the Wall Street stock market crash in 1929, and the Great Depression that followed, families who had been well-off suddenly found themselves living on the street and standing in bread lines.

'There had never been a more desperate time in the United States. '

In the social and economic darkness that fell across the nation in 1930 and 1931, however, there was one gleam of hope: in the most desolate and inhospitable corner of the Mojave Desert, the US government was about to start building the Hoover Dam.

Located on the Colorado River, 50km (30 miles) from the dirty little railroad town of Las Vegas, Nevada, the Hoover Dam project meant jobs, and so thousands of unemployed men and their hungry families crowded into southern Nevada, begging for work.

Ragtown

A panoramic view of 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.'

Surviving Ragtown

The Ragtown baker

It was too hot to keep fresh food: some people tried storing what they could in covered holes in the ground, or hanging in baskets from the ridge pole of their tent, but if the voracious black ants didn't find the food, then it was spoiled by the heat before it could be eaten.

Fresh water was another problem: men dug holes in the river bank, which filled with water, and when the mud had separated out their wives could dip buckets in to retrieve water for drinking and cooking. But it wasn't clean, and dysentery frequently swept the settlement. Sanitary arrangements were rudimentary, and ditch latrines were the norm, sprinkled with slaked lime to control stench and disease.

And yet Ragtown was a community. There was Murl Emery's store, a baker, and a barber named Curley - later arrested for bootlegging. The sandy ruts that were the streets of Ragtown had grand names such as Broadway and Riverside Drive. There were church services and a small school. Children played hide-and-seek along the riverbank, and took iguanas, horned toads, and kangaroo rats for pets.

'Children played hide-and-seek along the riverbank, and took iguanas, horned toads, and kangaroo rats for pets.'

Citizens formed a Welfare Club and Ladies' Aid Society to help newcomers or residents burned out by brushfires. There was a post office and an information bureau operated by Deputy Marshal Williams, who lived with his family in a tent on a hillside overlooking the settlement.

The deputy marshal's wife, Dorothy, wrote a social column about Ragtown for a Las Vegas newspaper. She titled it 'Williamsville Town Topics', and here she detailed the comings and goings of Ragtown residents as though it were a community like any other. Reporters from newspapers throughout the country, sent into Nevada to cover the Hoover Dam project, wrote stories about Ragtown, too. In describing to a Los Angeles Times reporter why she had come to Ragtown, Edith Powell, the first woman to arrive there, said:

'Where my husband goes, that's where I go. He wants me with him and I want to be with him. We've been in lots worse places than this. There's going to be a grand city here someday.'

Working life

Charles 'Chick' Julian: Hoover Dam high scaler

While their wives struggled to make homes for them in Ragtown, husbands crowded the construction site in Black Canyon competing with younger, single men hoping for any kind of paying work. Construction crews were not large this early in the project, and most of the available jobs were dangerous, dirty, and low-paid.

'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.'

Fighting for progress

The tough life of the tunnel worker

Nevertheless, in that first year of 1931, death on the project was common, and the litany of casualties reads like a dirge:

May 17: Harry Large and Andrew Lane die in a rock slide; May 18: Fred Olsen dies in a premature explosion; June 26: Ray Hapland dies of heat prostration; June 27: Pat Shannon dies of heat prostration; June 28: Mike Madzia dies of heat prostration.'

It was too much: the misery of life in Ragtown, and the danger and exploitation at the dam site inspired a strike. On 8 August the workers walked. Claiming to be fearful of riots, and of the influence of the Industrial Workers of the World union (IWW), the government shut the project down and ordered all workers to leave the area.

The Six Companies sent in strike-breakers with guns and clubs. Women and children, trapped in Ragtown, survived on food that was donated by Las Vegas merchants but was delivered by Six Companies agents - who made sure photographers were present to record their generosity.

'The Six Companies sent in strike-breakers with guns and clubs.'

The strike lasted one week, and the project resumed on 13 August. Hiring was formalised, and workers were no longer allowed to come onto the construction site for work, but had to go through a hiring hall in Las Vegas. Autumn, however, brought happier times with the cooler weather; there was more work as the project moved ahead, and the government rushed through the construction of Boulder City, on a wind-swept ridge seven miles from Ragtown.

In January 1932 the government issued an order known as the April 1 Rule. Under this rule, by April 1, 1932, everyone living in Ragtown had to leave, and the settlement was to be abandoned. It didn't take much persuasion, and by late spring 1932 Ragtown was empty.

Completion

The completed Hoover Dam

Workers moved up the hill into Boulder City, with its green parks and wide streets, its cottages and bungalows provided with clean, running water and electricity. The construction of the Hoover Dam moved rapidly, it was completed two years ahead of schedule, and it was dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt on 30 September 1935.

'All that remains of it are the spirits of those first workers and their families, drifting in the current where the river used to be.'

As Lake Mead rose behind the dam, Ragtown vanished under 150m (500ft) of dark water. All that remains of it are the spirits of those first workers and their families, drifting in the current where the river used to be.

Even though its foundation was laid in a mire of economic misery and personal tragedy, Hoover Dam stands today as an inspiring example of ingenuity and perseverance. As more years divide the dam's present from its past, those who were involved in its construction regard it with pride and affection.

Its place in the history of the United States and in the development of engineering methods remains unchallenged. Long after the story of its making has been forgotten, Hoover Dam will endure, its origins lost in time, its builders passed into myth.

Find out more

Books

Building Hoover Dam: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Andrew Dunar and Dennis McBride (University of Nevada Press, 2001)

Hoover Dam: An American Adventure by Joseph E Stevens (University of Oklahoma Press, 1988)

Hoover Dam and Boulder City by Marion V Allen (Redding, CA: author, 1983)

The Story of Hoover Dam reprint of a series published by Compressed Air Magazine in 1931-35 (Nevada Publications, c. 1980s)