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By Root 1524 0

like this. But one thing would lead to another. Before long, the Wattises were talking with Bechtel and Kaiser, and Henry and Dad were in touch with some other firms—J. F. Shea Construction of Los Angeles, McDonald and Kahn of San Francisco, General Construction of Seattle. In February of 1931, during a meeting at the Engineers Club in San Francisco, the first of the West’s supercompanies was born. There were eight firms altogether, but Kaiser couldn’t resist borrowing a name from the tribunal before which the tongs, the Chinese equivalent of the Mafia families, took their grievances. At his insistence, the executives agreed to call their joint venture Six Companies, Inc. Hocking everything but their shirts, they could barely scrape together the few million dollars they would need to buy enough equipment to begin the job. When the Bureau auctioned off the job, however, it was Six Companies’ amazingly low bid, in the amount of $48,890,995.50, that won. Once again, sang the Los Angeles Times, the West had “laughed at logic and driven [its] destiny over obstacles that rational minds deemed insuperable.”

The first eighteen months of work on Boulder Canyon Dam involved the construction of a new Colorado River. Four diversion tunnels were blasted through the rock of the box canyon, two on the Nevada side and two on the Arizona side, each of them three-quarters of a mile long. Their diameter was spacious enough to accommodate a jumbo jet shorn of its wings—a capacity that was needed mainly as insurance against an errant flood of 200,000 cubic feet per second, or more. The task required the excavation of three and half million tons of rock with enough dynamite to level Toledo. On November 13, 1932, four tremendous explosions blew out the entrances and exits of the two Arizona tunnels. The dust had not yet settled when a caravan of trucks lumbered onto a trestle bridge built downstream from the tunnel entrances and began dumping rocks and earth in the river’s path. Finding itself blockaded, the Colorado slowly roiled and rose in frustration; sensing an escape route, it rode off into the tunnels. In a matter of hours, the river had been lured out of a bed it had occupied since the Grand Canyon was formed.

No sooner was the Colorado flowing through the canyon walls than the crews began replacing the flimsy trestle dam with a far more substantial cofferdam; then, for good measure, they built another below. Made of earth and rock and faced with concrete, the upper cofferdam measured 450 by 750 by 96 feet. Half a century earlier, it would have been the largest dam in the world, but its usefulness was to be measured in months.

When the cofferdams were finished, the engineers turned to the next task—stripping the canyon abutments to expose fresh clean solid rock. Because the dam would rise more than seven hundred feet, there was no crane big enough to do the job; it would have to be done by hand. The four hundred men whose job it was to clean the walls were known as high-scalers. Those who persevered—seven were killed on the job—spent months hanging four or five hundred feet in the air, drilling holes in the rock, inserting dynamite, and praying they would be hauled to safety before it exploded. Because the canyon was so tight, they also had to blast out space for portions of the huge powerhouse, the intake towers, and the penstock headers. Some of the rock amphitheaters they created could have held an orchestra.

Besides the hazards of the construction work (the falling rock, the explosives, electrocution, behemoth machines); besides the hazards of off-hours (fist fights, drunken binges, social diseases from the whores who camped about); besides all this, there was the heat. The low-lying parts of the Colorado and Sonora deserts are the hottest corner of North America, and we are speaking of temperatures in open, ambient air. The Colorado’s box canyon held heat like an oven with the door open about an inch. Workers sometimes sacrificed eggs to see if they would actually fry on a sun-fired rock. The first death from heat prostration