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By Root 1425 0

on top were not even ants; they hardly qualified as fleas. Stretching overhead, from canyon rim to canyon rim, was a thick cable on which hung suspended a sixteen-ton bucket that lowered fresh concrete into the forms. Although it was big enough to accommodate a Buick, the bucket seemed incapable of ever filling the dimensions of Hoover Dam—the name it was ultimately to acquire. But twenty-four hours per day, 220 cubic yards an hour, it did. After two years of pouring, the dam was finally topped out. On March 23, 1935, it stood 726 feet and 5 inches tall.

When the engineers surveyed what they had built, it seemed impossible to believe that anything so immense could fail to hold back the Colorado River under every conceivable circumstance. Between 1907 and 1917, however, the wettest period on record, the river had discharged nearly enough water to fill the reservoir during several years: twenty-four million acre-feet; twelve million; twenty-five and a half million; fourteen million; twenty million; nineteen million; twenty million. Hidden within the figures were big floods, periods when the river flowed at 100,000 or 200,000 cubic feet per second for weeks in a row. If such a flood happened to hit when the reservoir was full, the full force of it would have to be spilled; the penstocks leading to the power plant would never be able to handle it. But 200,000 cfs sent over the top of the dam could erode it like a seawall in a storm. The dam, therefore, required spillways on either side, and to allow for the unforeseen and the incredible they were to be built to handle 400,000 cubic feet per second—nearly twice the Columbia River’s flow. The spillway troughs were excavated on the canyon sides of the intake towers and led into the vast diversion tunnels hollowed through the walls. Like everything else about the dam, they were designed curvilinear and graceful, with immense brass drum gates shaped like diamond heads. Set down in a spillway channel, the Bismarck would have floated clear. Some of the project engineers wistfully suggested that turbines be installed at the spillway outlets, even if they operated only during floods. With the penstocks and the outlet works both generating power, the dam, during brief periods, could have electrified the state of California.

Nothing, however, was more astonishing than the speed with which all of it was built. As the nation languished in the Depression, as plant after plant remained idle and company after company went bankrupt, Hoover Dam was being built at a breathtaking pace. The eyes of the country were fixed on it in awe. A landmark event—the completion of a spillway, the installation of the last generator—was front-page news. The initial excavations for the diversion tunnels had begun on May 16, 1931. The river was not detoured from its channel until November, and the cofferdams were not completed until April of 1933. But two years later, all the blocks in the dam were raised to crest elevation, and a year later everything was finished: spillways, powerplant, penstocks, generators, galleries, even the commemorative plaque in the frieze alongside U.S. Highway 93, which ran across the top. The first electrical power, from what was then the largest power plant in the world, was produced in the fall of 1936. The greatest structure on earth, perhaps the most significant structure that has ever been built in the United States, had gone up in under three years.

The difference in climate between the eastern and western United States-the fact that the East generally gets enough rainfall to support agriculture, while the West generally does not—is easily the most significant distinction between those two regions. It is also obvious that there are significant distinctions within each region as well. For example, oranges grow well in central Florida; they do not in South Carolina, a few hundred miles north. The climate in Duluth, Minnesota, is quite different from that in Chicago, a mere day’s drive away.

In the West, however, climatic differences far more striking than these may occur