178: “A Damn Big Dam”: Taming the Colorado River with the Hoover (or Boulder) Dam (Infrastructure pt. 1)

History That Doesn't Suck

ProfGregJackson

Education, History, Society & Culture

4.5 • 5.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2025

⏱️ 66 minutes

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Summary

“I felt no distress whatever…I was perspiring freely and was as limber and helpless as a wet rag. It was an exhilarating experience.... It was then and there that I first conceived the idea of the reclamation of the desert.” This is the story of the Hoover Dam. A wild, precarious, and dangerous river, the Colorado tears across the American southwest’s otherwise arid and largely uninhabitable desert. Yet, if tamed, the Colorado could reclaim countless acres; it could provide sustenance and hydroelectricity for untold millions! But that’s the catch: “if.” From a dehydrated mirage in 1849, to the outgrowth of an overwhelmed canal in the early twentieth-century Imperial Valley, this is the unlikely tale of the dreamers; government officials; a consortium of six construction companies, blandly called “Six Companies; Frank “Hurry Up Crow; and the 21,000 workers—over 100 of whom will wind up dead—who defied the odds and pushed engineering to new heights to “make the desert bloom.” ____ Connect with us on HTDSpodcast.com and go deep into episode bibliographies and book recommendations join discussions in our Facebook community get news and discounts from The HTDS Gazette come see a live show get HTDS merch or become an HTDS premium member for bonus episodes and other perks. HTDS is part of Audacy media network. Interested in advertising on the History That Doesn't Suck? Contact Audacyinc.com To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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1:08.9	It's about 3.30 in the blistering hot afternoon, Friday, August 7, 1931.
1:15.6	We're with well over 100 construction workers, all crammed on several barges, transporting us along a short stretch of the Colorado River, about 25 miles distant from the sleepy town of Las Vegas. More specifically, we're at a point
1:30.4	where this river straddling the Nevada-Arizona state line flows through the Black Canyon.
1:36.2	Named for the dark hue of its towering, shadowed, volcanic-recha-based walls. The Black Canyon is so
1:42.5	hardened, it's like Mother Nature's concrete.
1:45.6	That makes it the perfect sight to make the daring attempt to build a gigantic dam,
1:50.3	the tallest ever conceived by man at this point,
1:53.4	capable of transforming the American Southwest's arid, multi-state desert,
1:57.8	into an irrigated and electrified land that can sustain life on a large scale,
2:02.6	a land that could feed and support millions.
2:05.6	And all these men on these barges with us, they're the ones doing the back-breaking work to make that a reality.
	...

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