Library of Congress
Excavating for the foundation of the Hoover Dam , Boulder City , NV , 1934 .
Congress approved contracts worth $ 327 million in July . President Hoover immediately signed the first appropriation for $ 10 million , and Secretary Wilbur ordered Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Elwood Mead to begin constructing the railroad , electrical and highway complex needed to support the transportation of men and material to the new dam ’ s construction site .
In January 1931 , the Bureau published the specifications and plans for contractors that wanted to bid on the $ 49 million job of building what Secretary Wilbur had christened the “ Hoover Dam ” when he formally launched the project in a September 1930 ceremony . ( He believed in honoring President Hoover for his role in crafting the Colorado River Compact and paving the way for congressional approval of the project .) The construction proposal ’ s 100 pages of text and 76 drawings detailed 119 separate bid items and described tasks such as drilling and lining diversion tunnels , erecting concrete-mixing plants and building both cofferdams to protect the work area and the concrete face of the dam itself .
Few contractors had sufficient skills and experience in excavation , tunnel building , underwater construction , surface paving and related activities to undertake the entire project . Even fewer could afford to pay the required $ 2 million bid bond and $ 5 million performance bond . It became apparent that even experienced firms such as Morrison-Knudsen and Utah Construction would need to work with one another and form a consortium of companies to tackle this large , multi-faceted and timeconsuming project . In March , a group that had chosen the name Six Companies gathered $ 5 million in capital and won the record-setting $ 49 million contract to build the dam . By the middle of May , “ The Six ” had more than 1,100 men working on the initial phases of the project .
From March 1931 to March 1936 , more than 5,000 workers performed the skilled and unskilled tasks involved in different construction projects , several of which had to be completed before pouring concrete for the dam . Part of the workforce first created railroad , electrical and highway links from Las Vegas ( about 23 miles away ); at the same time , other crews built the residential community of Boulder City ( about eight miles from the site ) for the workers and their families .
Diverting the Colorado meant constructing both diversion tunnels to channel the water away from the site and cofferdams to surround the workplace and keep it dry . Next came excavating both the dry riverbed and the canyon walls down to the bedrock to prepare a proper foundation for the dam . In June 1933 , workers finally began pouring the 6.6 million tons of concrete needed to build the curvedface arch-gravity dam to its full height of 726 feet above the canyon floor . At about that same time , the new Secretary of the Interior , Harold Ickes , ordered Reclamation Commissioner Mead to begin referring to the dam by its original name , i . e ., the Boulder Dam . Few complained about that politically motivated change , reflecting the decline in Hoover ’ s reputation in the aftermath of his final years as President of the United States .
The work to construct the dam with its tunnels , spillways , intake towers and cofferdams , as well as the related hydroelectric powerplant , went on relentlessly
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