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00:00Exclusive corporate funding for American Experience is provided by Liberty Mutual.
00:06Major funding is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
00:10American Experience is also made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
00:14and viewers like you.
00:30It has been called an American Pyramid, a 60-story colossus of concrete built in the middle
00:41of a desert every bit as brutal as in ancient Egypt.
00:49Hoover Dam changed the history of the West.
00:54This is the biggest dam, dam that anybody had ever seen.
00:58There were many people who said it was physically impossible to build Hoover Dam, engineers who
01:04said that.
01:07In the 1930s, thousands of unemployed men came to this desolate canyon and for a few dollars
01:13a day risked their lives to build Hoover Dam.
01:21One hundred and twelve died on the job while extreme heat and working conditions brought
01:26illness or injury to uncounted others.
01:32Everybody that came here was desperate or they left before they even got a job.
01:36It was, it was about the worst nightmare you could think of working in it.
01:42Their challenge was to harness the country's wildest river, the mighty Colorado.
01:48To bring water, power and people to the southwest.
01:52Now, in a more environmentally conscious age, many wish Hoover Dam had never been built.
02:02But it stands as a monument to the ingenuity and the sheer human will that forever changed
02:08the face of America.
02:10Moonlight on the river, Colorado, how I wish that I were there with you.
02:31I loved that old river, it was beautiful.
02:36I'd swam the river, I'd boated the river, I'd taken people up the river on trips.
02:45I felt bad to see it tamed, to tell you the truth.
02:54The Colorado was a river unlike any other, dark and red with mud and silt from carving
03:05out the planet's most magnificent canyons.
03:10It ran wild until 1901, when western farmers set out to tame it.
03:21Their plan was to water the desert.
03:28Developers dug a canal system that brought the river west into lower California and turned
03:33parked soil into a vast agricultural paradise they called the Imperial Valley.
03:43For four bountiful years, farmers thought they were living a miracle.
03:48Then, without warning, the river struck back.
03:55In 1905, the Colorado tore open the canal and flooded the valley, creating an inland sea across
04:06150 square miles.
04:15Over the next two decades, floods would wipe out thousands of farmers.
04:23Millions of dollars were lost.
04:25The river was an enemy.
04:30Only in short periods of time could you look at it as a useful river.
04:34Most of the times, it was something that would kill you or ruin your farm.
04:41The Colorado River was out of control, and everybody says, we have no dams.
04:49We need a dam.
04:50And people started seriously looking at where to put a dam after 1907, up and down the river.
04:58The 1,400-mile Colorado became the obsession of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the agency
05:08charged with finding ways to irrigate the arid west.
05:16In 1920, the Bureau embarked on an ambitious plan to dam the Colorado and distribute its
05:23water hundreds of miles in every direction.
05:29It was called the Boulder Canyon Project.
05:34Survey crews were sent down the treacherous river to look for the best place to build what
05:39would be the largest dam in America.
05:44One of the slogans for the river at that time was that it was too thick to drink and too
05:49thin to plow.
05:57The battle to conquer the Colorado soon turned deadly.
06:02On December 20th, 1922, a surveyor, J.G. Tierney, fell off a boat and drowned.
06:11Tierney was the first man to die working on the project.
06:16This is a site in the Black Canyon, shaped first by Homer Hamlin in 1917.
06:25The dam will be about five hundred...
06:28After four years of surveys and tests, Bureau engineers chose Black Canyon on the Arizona-Nevada
06:34border as the site for Boulder Dam.
06:39But the $165 million price tag for a western water system made the eastern establishment
06:45nervous.
06:48The thing is, this was not a done deal.
06:50Politically, it had to be sold in Washington, D.C.
06:52It had to be sold to Congress.
06:54Politics have been dominated in the east.
06:56To talk about flood control in the west was to allow the west to get up and ask for more
07:01than they've been asking for.
07:05An uncommon sight began to spring up in the rugged canyon.
07:10Politicians running the river in three-piece suits.
07:19One of them was Herbert Hoover, the Secretary of Commerce and a former engineer.
07:25In 1922, Hoover negotiated an agreement among the seven western states that shared rights
07:30to the water to be captured by the proposed dam.
07:34With a contract in hand, the project cleared its first big political hurdle.
07:43But convincing Congress to send millions out west for the most expensive public project
07:48ever seemed impossible, until the Bureau came up with a way to pay for it, electricity.
08:01By selling the dam's hydroelectric power, the Bureau would fuel the growth of farms and cities
08:07across the emerging southwest.
08:11Los Angeles, its ever-sprawling metropolis, would be by far the single biggest customer.
08:20We here in Southern California, we're building a great empire.
08:24If we are to survive and to grow, we must have the water that will enable us to maintain our
08:32mastery over the desert.
08:36In 1929, after 12 years of intense lobbying, Congress finally authorized the funds.
08:47It was welcome news for a nation fallen on hard times.
08:53We was in the Depression, flat on its back, belly up.
08:59The press made an announcement that the government was going to build the largest dam in the world.
09:07So I went over to a car lot and bought a 26-inch car for $75, got into it and took off for Las Vegas.
09:22Of all places, 30 miles from Black Canyon, it was the only town anywhere near the dam site.
09:32Suddenly, thousands of jobless Americans were heading for a down-on-its-luck railroad stop in the middle of nowhere.
09:40They were desperate for work, and they were coming from anywhere and everywhere.
09:45Las Vegas was the mecca.
09:47Las Vegas was an opportunity.
09:49Las Vegas was a place to bring one's family and maybe have a livelihood.
09:53Everybody took for granted that there was a job available when they got there.
09:59But the government didn't warn the people that the building of the dam wouldn't start for almost a year,
10:06or there wouldn't be any jobs.
10:08And to come out and set up camp out in the desert was a pretty rough deal.
10:17People were living hand-to-mouth, living at the Union Pacific Railroad Station on the grass, courthouse grass.
10:25The town was overwhelmed.
10:32Others moved farther out toward Black Canyon, to a deadly desert place they called Ragtown.
10:41There was just nothing.
10:44There was no facilities, nothing.
10:46It was just, you dump the family out in the desert and that's it.
10:51And down where we were, it was like 130 degrees.
10:55And my mother and father didn't even have a tent.
10:59And my grandmother was so afraid, she didn't think we'd live through it.
11:03And she says, I don't think I'm going to ever see you again.
11:06Won't you please reconsider and come?
11:08Mother said, no, I've got to be with my husband.
11:12I suspect most people came from places where things were green.
11:19There was nothing green around here.
11:22Everything was baked and hot and brown.
11:27This was their future.
11:29As scary as it looked, fearful as this terrain was, this was their future and they knew it.
11:35By the summer of 1930, the government had not yet hired a contractor to build the dam.
11:49But the Bureau did begin laying rail and phone lines from Las Vegas out to Black Canyon.
11:56It hardly solved the unemployment problem, but it was a start.
12:02It was a start.
12:07On September 17th, Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of the Interior for Herbert Hoover, who was now President,
12:13came out to drive a silver railroad spike and mark the project's official beginning.
12:18Most Americans blamed Hoover for doing nothing about the Depression, and he badly needed some good press.
12:27Wilbur, wearing a wool suit in 100 degree heat, had his work cut out for him.
12:37Secretary Wilbur drove the spike. He missed it about three, four times.
12:42And of course, there was a lot of miners in the background telling him what a poor punk he was.
12:47I think that he was quite embarrassed.
12:50As Secretary of the Interior...
12:52But Wilbur's most lasting blow was struck in his closing remarks.
12:56I have the honor and privilege of giving a name to this new structure.
12:59In Black Canyon, under the Boulder Canyon Project Act, it shall be called the Hoover Dam.
13:05That really went over like a lead balloon.
13:08Boy, you should have heard him.
13:10They hooted and they hollered and called him the son of a bitch and everything else you could think of.
13:15The dam's new name would be a subject of dispute for the next 17 years.
13:22Builders from around the country came to study Black Canyon.
13:30But whoever did the job would have to come up with a $5 million performance bond,
13:36a risk far beyond the means of any single construction company.
13:40In the West, a group of independent contractors formed a partnership they called Six Companies.
13:50Prominent among them were Henry Kaiser, an ambitious young road builder from Oakland, California,
13:56and his mentor, Warren A. Bechtel, a powerful old-line San Francisco contractor.
14:05The compelling temptation to build this thing drove them.
14:10They just wanted it.
14:11There was money to be made and they made it.
14:14But there was something beyond that.
14:16This was the biggest project that anybody had ever thought of.
14:20The men of six companies would be gambling their money and their reputations.
14:26But they had an ace in the hole, the one man they believed could pull it off, an engineer named Frank Crowe.
14:38He was a commander, a field commander.
14:41Everybody knew he was good at his work.
14:43Everybody knew he was firm and fair and consistent.
14:47What he loved best was getting his boots muddy down in the river bottoms building dams.
14:56Frank Crowe had once been the Bureau of Reclamation's number one dam builder.
15:02But when the Bureau decided to hire outside contractors for their most ambitious dam ever,
15:07Crowe quit his government job and signed on with the men who planned to build it.
15:12He was wild to build this dam.
15:17This was his dream.
15:18And he wanted to be known as the greatest dam builder who ever lived in America.
15:24When Frank Crowe appeared on the scene, he was unmistakable.
15:27Let's put it that way.
15:29At six foot three to six foot four in height, a commanding presence that made a lot of men feel like,
15:36wow, he's the boss.
15:42But even a man like Frank Crowe was unprepared for a place like Black Canyon.
15:55It looks like it could be someplace on the moon.
15:58Nothing but hard solid rock and deep canyon.
16:02Everything was just harsh, harsh, harsh.
16:05A six company's engineer admitted they were all scared stiff.
16:15The government's plan called for a massive concrete wedge over 700 feet high,
16:21twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty and two football fields wide at the bottom.
16:28Workers would have to build two power plants at the base
16:31and dig four long tunnels through hard canyon rock to divert the river around the work site.
16:37They would need to pour four and a half million cubic yards of concrete,
16:42enough for a two-lane road from Los Angeles to Boston,
16:46and build a city in the desert virtually overnight to house 5,000 workers and their families.
16:52On March 4th, 1931, Frank Crowe submitted six companies' winning bid.
17:04In Las Vegas, the waiting was finally over.
17:07There were hordes of men there, desperate men.
17:14Maxine Reepin was fresh out of Las Vegas High School
17:19when she got a job at the dam's employment office.
17:22Her boss, Leonard Blood, reported that in its first three weeks,
17:28his office had received 12,000 letters of inquiry.
17:32The man came in one time.
17:35Mr. Blood took a look at him and says,
17:37You're too old.
17:38He had a gruff voice, and the man had kind of white hair.
17:42He looked so dejected.
17:44And he went out, and a couple of weeks later,
17:49here comes this man back in.
17:51He's dyed his hair.
17:52He's changed his name.
17:54And he got in line, and Mr. Blood didn't even recognize him.
17:59I did, because I was sitting there watching him all the time.
18:02And that time, he got a job.
18:04I was playing with a dance band in Grand Junction, Colorado,
18:10practically starving to death, you know.
18:13People were so poor, they couldn't afford to dance.
18:16So my dad says, If you come on, I can get you a job.
18:20Well, little did I know, I've never done anything but blow that horn.
18:24I didn't know what to expect.
18:26Trying to imagine how it must have been to go down there and start working that site,
18:39you know, leaves me with a feeling like, God, what if you were the first guy down there?
18:43And you picked up the shovel and looked around and say,
18:46Well, I guess I'll start digging right here.
18:49In the beginning, there were no roads.
18:58Down at the bottom, there was no dry place to stand.
19:05There's no access there.
19:07You've got an amphibious assault of these troops coming down on barges,
19:11cutting out landings almost like a beach landing in a World War II amphibious assault.
19:16Crowe sent miners down the river to start the first and most dangerous phase of construction,
19:23the four diversion tunnels, two on each side of the river.
19:31Work crews would have to drill and blast three quarters of a mile through the canyon walls
19:36to open the holes that would carry the river around the work site.
19:44Fifty-six feet in diameter, they would then be lined with three feet of concrete.
19:51Those diversion tunnels were unique.
19:53To get them lined up, the job of drilling and shooting with dynamite, you know, removing the rock,
19:58it was logistically one of the toughest things they did in the dam.
20:04Six companies also had to contend with a rigid government deadline.
20:09Two and a half years to divert the river or face steep fines for every day they ran late.
20:18The volatile Colorado constantly threatened the job.
20:21In a flash, seasonal floods could wash away any plans for finishing on time.
20:34An almost comic contraption turned out to be Frank Crowe's best weapon against the tunnel deadline.
20:39The steel and wood beast, called a drilling jumbo, carried three tiers of drills on a ten-ton truck.
20:52The rig was backed up to the face of the wall and the 30 drills bored holes into the rock to plant dynamite.
20:59The jumbo could then be pulled away for blasting and the whole operation moved to the next drilling area.
21:05That was a pretty clever idea because before they'd have to put up staging.
21:14Then the staging would have to be taken down when they blew the face and then they'd have to replace it.
21:20It was a big time saver.
21:2210 million cubic yards of rock had to be moved, drag lines, electric power shovels, trucks, men, dynamite, drills, noise, thunder, dust.
21:37There were always cave-ins. There were always loose and sharp rocks falling about.
21:44You had men stumbling in areas that were not correctly lighted, getting in each other's way.
21:49You had men hurrying the job up considerably because they needed to move on because of the pressures they were getting from their foreman or the assistant superintendent.
21:56In the rush to make their deadline, six companies sacrificed safety for speed.
22:07Frank Crow prowled the dam site day and night.
22:11To his men, he was both God and the devil, fair but intensely demanding.
22:16They gave him the nickname, Hurry Up Crow.
22:25The six company foremen, they're on me all the time.
22:29Keep the trucks moving, everybody moving.
22:34I was the flag man, flagging dump trucks.
22:36And lo and behold, I took a look up there and I saw a high scaler, way up high on the Nevada side, coming down.
22:48And he fell very close to where I was standing.
22:52So I take a quick look, thinking that there's no trucks coming, make a mad dash over to this guy.
22:58Nothing I could do for him.
23:00Along come a hard-boiled superintendent, and I told him there's a man killed over there.
23:07And he said to me in no uncertain terms,
23:10What are you going to do with all these blankety-blank trucks?
23:13Eat them!
23:15Get the trucks moving, he can't hurt anybody.
23:22Crow's most experienced workers had followed him faithfully from dam to dam.
23:26But many more had simply come for a job, any job, and knew little or nothing about this kind of work.
23:36My first shift was in one of the big diversion tunnels.
23:40The foreman come by and he said,
23:42Nelson, get on the tunnel, get a jackhammer, bring it up here and break up this rock.
23:47I had to admit to him that I was so dumb.
23:51I didn't even know what a jackhammer was.
23:52A lot of these young men, they weren't used to this heavy work, the environment.
24:01The heat was terrific.
24:04The noise was unbearable.
24:06I'll tell you, I was pretty discouraged about that first night that I put in, they put me on a graveyard shift.
24:14And I said to myself, I don't know whether I can take this or not, but I'll give it my all.
24:21That first summer, the six companies' payroll reached 1,400.
24:27The work never stopped.
24:30Three shifts a day, every day.
24:33You had to work seven days a week.
24:36You couldn't work five and a half days, which most people did.
24:40And if you didn't like it, why, they'd can you.
24:43Two days off a year, optional, without pay, the 4th of July and Christmas.
24:51The contractor never had it so good, because he had the pick of the nation's best labor at the price he wanted to pay him.
24:58It was a brutal job under the best of circumstances.
25:12But the summer of 1931 was one of the hottest on record.
25:17The men worked in blistering heat, without shade and adequate drinking water.
25:28Workers collapsed from the heat, some with body temperatures as high as 112 degrees.
25:38The lucky ones were packed in tubs of ice water and survived.
25:43By August, heat and dehydration had claimed 14 lives.
25:50Hot temperatures, 135, 140 degrees in those diversion tunnels.
25:59The carbon monoxide was so thick, a string of lights along the canyon wall looked like somebody striking matches.
26:08You'd come out of there with a headache that wouldn't quit.
26:13Nevada law prohibited gasoline-powered trucks in the tunnels.
26:18But six companies claiming the job was under federal jurisdiction used them anyway.
26:23Carbon monoxide and dust choked the tunnels and silently poisoned the men inside.
26:32Carbon monoxide was knocking these men down, making them very, very ill.
26:36When they were taken to the hospital, the doctors would say, it's pneumonia.
26:42They would not say, it's carbon monoxide poisoning and six companies is responsible.
26:48They were saying, it's pneumonia. We're not responsible.
26:51Temperatures and tempers reached the kindling point on August 7, 1931,
26:56when six companies reassigned a number of workers to lower paying jobs.
27:04Organizers from the radical labor union, the industrial workers of the world, pressed for action.
27:11Within hours, the entire workforce went out on strike.
27:14The canyon fell strangely silent.
27:30Even the more loyal workers, not interested in union activity,
27:34not necessarily even interested in striking,
27:35we're at the point of saying, we've got to do something.
27:38They wanted clear water, good water, cold water.
27:40They wanted the electrical lines that were near puddles where people were being electrocuted to be moved.
27:45They wanted the dynamite put into safety places.
27:48The dam was moving so quickly that the six companies were not making the necessary provisions for safety.
27:53As much as they would say they were, they weren't.
27:57And the workers knew that.
28:01Frank Crow took the strike as a personal betrayal.
28:05His bosses at six companies stood firm.
28:07The workers will have to work under our conditions, they said, or not at all.
28:13They rejected every worker demand and banished suspected union members.
28:19After six days, the strike collapsed.
28:22Security was beefed up and a control gate installed,
28:26while Leonard Blood and his staff at the employment office began reassembling the workforce.
28:31One day, Mr. Blood was sick.
28:36Well, hungover is a better word.
28:39But anyway, he came by and says, Maxine, you'll have to do the hiring today.
28:44I'm going home.
28:46So they called in and wanted 90 laborers.
28:49They said, can you hire 90 laborers?
28:52And I said, sure.
28:54I had a lot of confidence when you're young.
28:55And I thought, now here's my chance to get all these young boys that haven't had a chance to go to work.
29:03And when they went out, the foremen were making a joke out of it.
29:08They said, when I did the hiring, it looked like a college campus.
29:12But when Mr. Blood did it, it looked like an old people's home.
29:14As the hellish year of 1931 turned to 1932, tensions eased when six companies finally moved workers and their families out of Ragtown and into Boulder City.
29:32It was a modern, model community, free of the liquor and gambling that was Las Vegas' stock in trade.
29:46Single men moved into large dormitories, while row upon row of one-, two-, and three-room family cottages went up in a fury of sawdust and sand.
29:58The landscape changed so rapidly that it was common for a man to come home after a shift and walk into the wrong house.
30:09Oh, it not only grew daily, it grew nightly.
30:14I couldn't remember ever sleeping, that hammers weren't going and stuff like that.
30:19And how the people in swing shift slept, I'll never know.
30:22They built them rabbit hutches and called them houses, crude as could be.
30:29They cost about five, six hundred dollars a piece, and they rented them from fifteen dollars up, depending on how many rooms you had.
30:37But as one resident put it, to us, it was beautiful.
30:42In the unsettled world of the Depression, Boulder City offered families a security they hadn't known in years.
30:57They built community very fast.
31:00In the neighborhood, I knew every single neighbor loved me.
31:03I knew that.
31:05And I could go to any home, knock on it any day.
31:08I was never, there wasn't such a thing as fear of, of a child being out, you know, and something happening to them.
31:16It was a fenced and gated world unto itself.
31:20Boulder City was run, really, very much like an army camp.
31:27Great restrictions on what could go on and what couldn't go on, and a law enforcement that saw to it that these things were carried out.
31:37Boulder City had elements of both the model town and the police state.
31:41It was a certain comfort level, but you gave up freedom for the comfort level.
31:43A shiny new mess hall served six thousand meals a day.
31:52Every week, twelve tons of fruit and vegetables were shipped in, along with five tons of meat and two and a half tons of eggs.
32:01For a dollar fifteen a day, a man got three squares and all he could eat.
32:08This box lunch, they carried that down.
32:10Some of those guys could chunk ten sandwiches in there, two pieces of pie, and maybe a couple of oranges.
32:18In a nation where millions were going hungry, few ate as well as the workers of Hoover Dam.
32:29For Herbert Hoover, the depression had taken its toll.
32:33He lost the 1932 election to Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide.
32:36A week later, he stopped off at the dam site on his way from California to Washington.
32:43He stayed only briefly, and left just hours before his beloved project faced its most crucial test.
32:50On the morning of November 13th, the nation's media converged on Black Canyon to witness the historic attempt to reroute to Colorado.
33:01At 1130 in the morning, a blast was put off down there near the entry in one of the big diversion tunnels.
33:10That was what put the show on the road.
33:17Now they had to force the powerful Colorado to change direction.
33:24Throughout the day, workers furiously dumped tons of rock into the river's path, trying to build a barrier high enough and strong enough to push it back into the tunnels.
33:40By dawn, the battle was won.
33:46Man had moved the mighty Colorado from the bed it had known for 12 million years.
33:54For Frank Crowe, it was a personal triumph.
34:07He had beaten the river and his deadline by 11 months.
34:12Once the water was being bypassed over that site, people came to worship in a way.
34:27People couldn't help but make the pilgrimage to this wonderful technological achievement.
34:32Hell, the country's out of control, the economy's out of control, but we're controlling the Colorado River.
34:42The vast chasm seemed a slit through earth and time alike, wrote author Frank Waters.
34:50The rank smell of Mesozoic ooze and primeval muck filled the air.
34:58Down below grunted and growled prehistoric monsters.
35:02Great brute dinosaurs, steam shovels and cranes, feeding on the muck a ton at a gulp.
35:12And all this incessant, monstrous activity took place as if in a world taking shape before the dawn of man.
35:25The men were just swarming over the whole place. They just looked like a hill of ants. They really did.
35:31It was just fantastic to watch all of that going on. It was a monumental task.
35:36Of all the jobs on the dam, none was more dramatic and dangerous than that of the high scalers.
35:46Men swinging from ropes 800 feet up, armed with dynamite and jackhammers,
35:53to blast and clean the canyon walls and prepare them to take the dam's concrete.
35:57Their exploits became legend, real, honest-to-goodness cliffhangers.
36:04It was like a movie of Tarzan, you know. You'd hear the blast and then you'd see those guys just fling themselves down there and start ripping the rocks off and there were people above them and people below them.
36:16I remember this big strong looking man fell. And he yelled as he fell and this high scaler below him swung out and caught him as he was falling and saved his life.
36:33Oh, he got write-ups and was quite a hero after that.
36:40Others, there were two or three fell to their death, maybe even more.
36:48By 1933, six companies was two years ahead of schedule and reported a profit of $3 million.
36:55They had pretty much had their way with the project until the New Deal's own force of nature, Harold Ickes, took over as Secretary of the Interior.
37:06One of the first things he did was to rename it Boulder Dam.
37:13Now this stemmed not merely from his stated position that it was not seemly to name a dam after a sitting president,
37:21but because he really did not like Hoover at all.
37:28He also was very, very irritated with the six companies and the way the blacks were discriminated against on the job.
37:35He put a stop to discrimination in hiring.
37:38He made it a point that blacks should be considered as well as whites.
37:44In the first year of construction, not a single black worker had been hired.
37:48When Ickes took office, there were only 24 African Americans in a 4,000-man workforce.
37:55Ickes' pressure led to more minority hiring, but no blacks were allowed to live in Boulder City.
38:03This was a closed community. Negroes were not...
38:07There was no way a Negro could get in here.
38:10No way anyone with a colored skin could get in here.
38:12Black workers were transported to the work site on separate buses and drank from separate water buckets.
38:21Hiring may have opened up, but the dam remained a segregated workplace.
38:26The major event in every worker's life was payday.
38:37Twice a month, on the 10th and 25th, they cashed their paychecks, burst out of the moral confines of Boulder City,
38:44and headed down the highway to Las Vegas to the gambling halls, bars and brothels of its infamous Block 16.
38:53At sunup, the men would stagger back to Boulder City, and for the next 15 days, Las Vegas went back to bed.
39:17On June 6, 1933, after two years of preparation, workers finally poured the first bucket of concrete that would build the dam's famous face.
39:31Frank Crowe now had 5,000 men working in a deep and narrow canyon.
39:50His main task, he said, was to keep them from accidentally killing each other.
39:5565 had already lost their lives.
40:06To transport the concrete, Crowe designed an elaborate network of aerial cableways that carried material to almost anywhere on the dam site.
40:18Before long, the cables were delivering a concrete bucket every 78 seconds.
40:25Doggone, you know, pretty tricky job.
40:2720-ton bucket filled with concrete roaring down over the canyon just as fast as they could get it there.
40:33The fellow that was running the crane couldn't even see where that bucket was going.
40:36He was steering that thing by braille, boy, I'll tell you.
40:43The buckets poured concrete into blocks five feet deep that were stacked one on top of another in interlocking columns to form the dam's structure.
40:51If the builders had tried to pour one continuous concrete wall, it would have taken 125 years to cool.
41:01Though legend claims otherwise, no workers were buried in the dam's concrete.
41:08While the arch was going up, workers were constructing the four intake towers on the cliffs behind.
41:2333 stories high, they would deliver water from the reservoir to the power plants under construction below.
41:31There were things happening every second of every day down there.
41:39All the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that had to be in place for this industrial construction to go on are just simply amazing.
41:45Frank Crowe's workers were pouring more concrete in less time than anyone thought possible.
41:56He had succeeded in turning a ragtag army of unemployed into America's most celebrated workforce.
42:03On February 6th, 1935, the last bucket of concrete topped off the dam at 726 and a half feet.
42:22That week, a steel bulkhead gate closed off the last diversion tunnel.
42:27The Colorado slowly began to pool behind the dam.
42:37It would form Lake Mead, 115 miles long, 500 feet deep.
42:42We got into what I call now the little puddle that was the lake at that time, and we went up to the back part of the dam.
42:55And this great big structure, this, oh my God, big hunk of concrete corking up the Colorado River.
43:05And the intake towers sitting on the cliffs, way up above us.
43:14Now when you go over the dam, it looks like the intake towers are right in the middle of the lake, you know.
43:20And the dam, you only see a small portion of it.
43:23You can't get the feeling of the immensity of the dam.
43:27And it looks a lot bigger from that side than it does from the face side.
43:31It really does.
43:35Dramatic.
43:38It looks like the hands of man holding back the canyon walls.
43:45From the beginning, the dam's visual design had been given extraordinary attention.
43:54The Bureau of Reclamation realized that this was an epic-making construction.
44:00And the consequence is that they called in Gordon Kaufman.
44:08And he took the banal details of the engineers that were in the original specifications,
44:15and he turned it into one of the great modern landmarks of the 1930s.
44:22Architect Gordon Kaufman gave the dam its futuristic style.
44:34He transformed ordinary concrete surfaces into modern art deco designs.
44:39The electrical transformers took on the look of a 1930s Buck Rogers space movie.
44:53The intake towers rose out of the lake like rockets to the moon.
45:00And the streamlined spillways gave the huge mass a constant sense of motion.
45:11Inside the powerhouses hum the engines of the American Southwest.
45:22Seventeen turbines generating more than two billion watts of electricity.
45:27Enough to supply 1.3 million people.
45:31The power plants' terrazzo floors recall the Native American heritage of the land.
45:45They are modeled on Indian designs, Navajo pottery.
45:51Symbols that look remarkably like the modern machine, the turbine, the gears that are all in motion.
45:59It's a perfect example of reaching to the past and abstracting from that for the future.
46:06It's like a chapel in a sense.
46:09It's like the chapel of the machine age.
46:12On September 30th, 1935, a crowd of 20,000 swarmed over what was being called the eighth wonder of the world.
46:34President Roosevelt came to dedicate the dam two years ahead of schedule.
46:42I have the right once more to congratulate you who have builded Boulder Dam.
46:52And on behalf of the nation to say to you, well done.
46:59In one final flourish, the designers inlaid a celestial map to mark the exact position of the stars on the day of the President's dedication.
47:14You know, this was built in a time when it was the first big one.
47:22And so many engineering feats afterwards have always kind of had a connection to the building of Hoover Dam.
47:30In a sense of this is where we learned how to do it.
47:42It was a very, very important thing as symbol of what they felt could be done in a world that had gone all to hell.
47:51On December 20th, 1935, a worker named Patrick Tierney fell from an intake tower and drowned.
48:04He was the last man to die on the project, 13 years to the day after the first man died.
48:11J. G. Tierney, his father.
48:14When I was looking at the dam, I thought of the young men that had given up their life to build a dam thing.
48:28That's what I thought of when I was looking at the dam.
48:38At the bottom of Lake Mead, 500 feet down lie the remains of places like Ragtown.
48:45The ancient river valley is long gone.
49:01Hoover Dam heralded the beginning of the modern industrial west.
49:07Its electricity spurred unprecedented growth.
49:10Its flood control and irrigation created some of America's biggest farms and allowed them to flourish in the desert.
49:25The men of six companies went on to become some of the richest contractors in the world.
49:30And Frank Crow took home a $350,000 bonus from the job.
49:37He would build four more dams, but Hoover Dam, the name officially given it by Congress in 1947, stands as his crowning achievement.
49:47I should say I felt proud that I was a part of it.
49:58And so that structure down there, right to this day, I almost feel like holding my hand over my heart when I go down there.
50:05Because that dam was a part of me.
50:09It was a part of me.
50:10I can assure you that.
50:11I can assure you that.
50:12I don't shouldn't do that.