THE WILD RIVER AND THE GREAT DAM
THE CONSTRUCTION OF HOOVER DAM AND THE VANISHING COLORADO RIVER
“Bound to become the authority on this modern American marvel.”
—Booklist, starred review
“Compellingly comprehensive.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A fascinating blend of social and environmental history and engineering.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Built during the worst years of the Great Depression, Hoover Dam was the biggest dam in the world and biggest structure in the United States—the product of national ambition, technical ingenuity, and the labor of tens of thousands of men. It left behind a landscape forever changed, transformed the economies of the southwestern states, and its impact stretched down the decades of the twentieth century to the crisis facing the Colorado River today. This is its story.
Photo: Panorama of Hoover Dam during Construction, 1935.
Photo: Excavating the foundation for Hoover Dam in Black Canyon, 1933.
Photo: Hoover Dam, by Ansel Adams, 1941.
Photo: Panorama of Hoover Dam during Construction, 1935.
“The way The Wild River and the Great Dam weaves together the complexity of the basic engineering of a dam and in particular this dam, the evolution of communities of workers and their families, the fundamental need for water and its management, the maintaining of segregation and the mostly disregarding of indigenous American rights is truly breathtaking. This is a powerful story and like the water slowly rising behind that concrete barrier, it becomes more powerful with each page turn.”
—DAVID MACAULAY
“An exciting mix of research, storytelling, and an astounding true story—one that’s still unfolding today.”
—STEVE SHEINKIN
FROM THE INTRODUCTION
Curley, Marion, and Joe were three of the more than twenty thousand men who built Hoover Dam. They came from every state in the country. Some were experienced construction workers who moved from project to project. Many were not: men who had lost jobs in the Depression and had come to the damsite desperate to find any sort of work.
Together with the massive dam, they built two power generation plants, overflow channels called spillways, four intake towers to draw water from the reservoir—each four hundred feet tall, the height of a thirty-story skyscraper—and a vast network of tunnels, pipes, gates, and valves. They poured more concrete than the US government had used in all its previous dam-building projects combined. Continue reading
SIMON BOUGHTON was born in England, attended Cambridge University and the University of Essex, and has worked as a book publisher in New York for the past thirty-five years. Books he has edited and published have won the Caldecott Medal, the Michael Printz Award, the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and many other awards and honors.
"No other single piece of man’s handiwork"—Frank Waters, The Colorado (1946) / Photo: United States Bureau of Reclamation. "This is a job for machines"—Construction Superintendent Frank Crowe / Photo: Library of Congress. "They came with everything"—Colorado River boatman Murl Emery / Photo: Union Pacific Railroad/UNLV Digital Collections. "It just seemed like it was so terrible hot"—Boulder City resident Helen Holmes / Photo: United States Bureau of Reclamation. "Boulder Dam, with all its hardships"—Edmund Wilson (1931) / Photo: United States Bureau of Reclamation. "An engineering victory"—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1935) / Photo: United States Bureau of Reclamation. "That baby"—dam worker Tommy Nelson / Photo: Ansel Adams/Library of Congress.
Author photo: Véronique Lefèvre Sweet
Copyright © Simon Boughton