Colossus Quotes

“Across that time span “Hoover Dam” and “Boulder Dam” were used interchangeably, the preference often depending on the political leanings of the speaker. The matter generated so much confusion and acrimony that in the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1947 a letter writer named Frank Romano Sr. was provoked to propose that the structure in Black Canyon be named “Hoogivza Dam.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“The lone exception was the Bureau of Reclamation, which had one enormous project already mapped out, with years of engineering and architectural studies behind it, all tied up neatly with the ribbon of congressional approval and bow of a presidential signature. This was, of course, the Boulder Canyon Project.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“Leaving aside the impossibility of funding all this activity from the public purse, the main problem with these programs was the dearth of construction plans to absorb even a fraction of the phantom billions—there were almost no surveys, no feasibility studies, no blueprints, and no prospect for drafting”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“at the dawn of the 1930s, state and local budgets dwarfed federal outlays by a factor of ten. Limited largely to the keeping of a standing army and navy and the payment of obligations incurred in wartime (including interest on war debt and the upkeep of veterans), the federal budget amounted to a negligible 3 percent of gross national product. By the end of the twentieth century, that figure would be closer to 20 percent.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“In the teeming crowd gathered for a ceremony outside Las Vegas on the afternoon of September 17, 1930, there must have been quite a few people hoping to see the guest of honor look ridiculous. They were not disappointed. Interior Secretary Ray Lyman Wilbur had come west for the formal launch of the Boulder Canyon Project. His role in the ritual was to drive a spike of Nevada-mined silver into a tie at the spot where the Union Pacific’s Salt Lake-Los Angeles trunk line was to branch off toward the future site of Boulder City, which was to be the staging point for the project and the hometown for its workers and their families.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“Utah boasted experience of dam building on a grand scale, having completed the O’Shaughnessy Dam in Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley in 1923 for a San Francisco municipal water project. That $7 million project had had enough peculiarities to toughen the hide of any construction man. For one thing, it was the subject of one of the most explosive environmental battles in American history,”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“Crowe had first encountered Harry Winford Morrison in 1909, on the muddy bank of a canal outside Boise, where they were foremen of separate crews lining the ditch with concrete.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“In early 1924, Weymouth offered him the post of regional engineer in Denver, a desk from which Crowe would oversee all construction in seventeen Western states. As this was the region where Reclamation was spending most of its budget, the job was tantamount to the bureau’s chief of construction.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“Crowe accepted a job with Morrison-Knudsen at some point in April or May 1925. He would build three dams in five years for the partnership. After Guernsey came Van Giesen Dam outside Sacramento, finished in 1928 for the state of California, and Deadwood Dam in Idaho, another Reclamation project, in 1930. As always, he worked at breakneck speed, poring over the blueprints of the next dam even before he was finished with the present one.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“many features of the dam construction camp of 1905 would still be very much in existence on the Colorado River in 1931—including racial and ethnic discrimination, profiteering at the company store, and the flouting of health and safety regulations in the name of efficient and speedy construction. At Black Canyon, the threat of a Wobbly rebellion would still cast a shadow.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“I had spent my life in the river bottoms and Boulder meant a wonderful climax,” Crowe recalled in 1943. “I was wild to build this dam.” So, too, were the founders of Six Companies, Inc., the unwieldy contracting consortium assembled in 1931 to make a bid on the dam project.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“By 1930, when the Department of the Interior put the Boulder Canyon Project out for bid, Frank Crowe had been involved in the construction of fourteen dams, five of them as superintendent. He was widely recognized as a gifted deployer of men and materials and an audacious problem solver. When”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“Hurry-Up Crowe. Yet there was something more, something intangible, that endowed Crowe with the ability to drive his crews at a clip that bowed to almost no obstacle, not a killing cold spell nor suffocating desert heat nor the boundaries of human endurance. Perhaps the secret was his ability to communicate a shared goal. Men choking on gasoline fumes in an underground tunnel nearly a mile long, or suspended on ropes two thousand feet in the air from the rim of a gorge, drills in hand, or sunk to their ankles in wet concrete under a remorseless desert sun might well question from time to time whether the work was worth the four or five dollars they earned for a punishing eight-hour shift. Frank Crowe made them understand the honor of participating in the creation of something eternal. “I’m proud that I had a hand in it,” said Tex Nunley, whose myriad jobs in Boulder Canyon included painting white crosses on solid rock walls to mark the center line of the tunnels the drillers were to drive through them. “Yes I am. I think it was a marvelous piece of work.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“He knew every man who worked for him by his first name, it was said, but his daughters could not recall ever seeing him give their mother a kiss.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“In California history, the death toll of the St. Francis Dam disaster remains second only to that of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. It still reigns as the worst failure of American civil engineering in the twentieth century. Annihilated in the catastrophe, along with $15 million in property and hundreds of lives, was William Mulholland’s reputation.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“single consistent legal principle of water rights might have resolved their conflicts. In the West, however, there was not one principle in use, but two that were mutually incompatible. These were riparian law and the rule of prior appropriation. Unless the delegates to the compact commission could reach an agreement superseding both, the harvest would be not economic progress, but Hoover’s nightmare of endless litigation. The riparian doctrine had originated in temperate regions, where water was abundant and arable land almost always situated adjacent to a river. The rule granted the owner of land abutting a stream the right to use the water flowing past his property, on condition that his use did not interfere with the same right of landowners downstream. The river and its waters were inviolate, belonging as property to no one.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“the principle of prior appropriation, which held that water belonged to whoever first put it to use, regardless of the user’s proximity to the source, and that the priority remained in force as long as the use continued. The rule of prior appropriation, in its simplest formulation, was “first in time, first in right.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“The states could be divided roughly into two basins. The upper basin comprised Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico—all rural, agrarian, and underdeveloped. The lower basin states were Arizona and California—agriculturally more productive, increasingly industrial, and voraciously thirsty—and Nevada, which fit geographically with its two neighbors, but which constituted a category all its own, unpopulated, arid, and seemingly devoid of prospects for development of any kind. (That impression would be dramatically contradicted in coming decades.)”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“Out of tradition and habit, the effort to dam the Colorado would continue to be known as the Boulder Canyon Project and its legislative mandate as the Boulder Canyon Project Act. But its location would be Black Canyon.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“The river instantly resumed its thundering way toward the Salton Sea. Cory brought the river back under control on November 4 “by exhausting the capacities of every quarry between Los Angeles and Nogales, four hundred and eighty-five miles to the east.” Yet one month later, the river busted loose again. For Harry Cory, the sixth failed attempt to close the breach was the last straw. The Southern Pacific had poured more than a million dollars “into that hole” and the river had swept it all away. A sustainable repair required not only a dam, but the construction and permanent maintenance of fifteen miles of levees along the west bank, reinforced with concrete and steel to keep the river corralled even at its most violent. These would be the most expensive levees ever built over such a distance—not a job for the Southern Pacific, in his weary judgment. The railroad was the most resourceful, rich, and powerful enterprise in the Southwest, yet the river had brought it to its knees.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“The people of Mexicali, a city that had expanded organically over the low alluvial plain at the river’s edge, waged a futile battle to protect themselves from the advancing cataract. In the end there was nothing for them to do but watch stoically as the flood chewed away at the riverbanks and coursed through their streets, devouring the town house by adobe house. On June 30 the main business district collapsed into the water, a dozen brick buildings swept away in a matter of hours while the townspeople stood transfixed under clouds of spray towering forty feet in the air. Before the flood was over, four-fifths of the town would be wiped out.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“the phenomenon known as the “cutback.” In simple terms, the river was carving itself a new gorge. Rather than flowing into the Salton Sink as though down an unbroken incline, the current hurtled over a precipice at the point where the New River entered the Salton Sea. This miniature Niagara proceeded to claw its way upstream at a pace of a mile a day, leaving in its wake a canyon eighty feet deep. For a time, the display of nature ruthlessly at work attracted curiosity seekers to the brink of the new gorge. But no one could ignore the awful consequences that would ensue if the cutback continued working its way upstream. If it managed to cleave through the main canal at the Alamo River, all the Imperial Valley’s irrigation channels would drain into the gorge like unstoppered bathtubs, leaving almost all the valley’s arable land sitting eighty feet above the water level. Irrigation would cease forever.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“the federal government pondered the river’s greater virtues. Davis’s railroad survey had whetted the War Department’s thirst for geographic knowledge. The task of achieving the next great leap in understanding was assigned to a young officer of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers bearing the evocative name of Joseph Christmas Ives.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“thirty-four-year-old Ohio-born physician, Oliver Meredith Wozencraft had contracted an acute case of wanderlust from the Argonauts passing through his hometown of New Orleans. Early in 1849 he left behind”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“The desert was in fact a deposit of rich soil eroded by the Colorado River from the basin upstream and transported south at the rate of 160 million tons a year.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“Attached to the survey was William Phipps Blake, a young geologist from a prominent Eastern family. Blake’s party failed to discern a suitable railroad route, but he did stumble upon a remarkable geologic feature in the trackless desert.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“The United States became in that post-dam era a country very different from the United States that built it. It was transformed from a society that glorified individualism into one that cherished shared enterprise and communal social support. To be sure, that change was not all the making of the dam itself; Social Security, the Works Progress Administration, and other New Deal programs forged in the crucible of the Depression played their essential role, as did the years of war. But the dam was the physical embodiment of the initial transformation, a remote regional construction project reconfigured into a symbol of national pride.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“The transformation of America that took place during the post-World War II period really began a decade earlier, with the completion of Hoover Dam. The story of America in the last half of the twentieth century is the story not of the postwar era, but the post-dam era.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam