Fortune Magazine
September 1933
The
following article was taken from the September 1933 issue of Fortune
Magazine. At that time the name of the dam had switched from Hoover to
Boulder Dam. It would stay Boulder Dam until 1947, when Congress changed
the name back to Hoover Dam. Because this article was published before
the dam was completed there are some inaccuracies. Editorial comments
will appear within brackets [ ]. This is a long article and has been
broken up into several sections. Click on the continue button at the
bottom of each page to go to the next section.
The Dam
Boulder Dam will probably be the biggest dam, perhaps the biggest man-made thing in the whole wide world. But since engineering is a craft in which men hold their jobs by being exactly right, even the dam engineers make no flat claim for their colossus. They tell you there are other canyons and other rivers which could take greater dams. But below these other rivers there are no dried out wastes of potential farm land wide enough for their prisoned floods to water; and, as populations are now settling, no cities are at hand to burn their power. Probably they won't be built.
Boulder Dam was, first of all, a vision in the desert. It was the vision
primarily of Arthur Powell Davis of the U.S. Reclamation Service [now
called the Bureau of Reclamation]. A month before he died, Arthur Powell
Davis was appointed Consulting Engineer on the dam project. And thereby
hangs a nicely ironic tale. Mr. Davis had his vision back in 1902. His
uncle, John Wesley Powell, made the first foolhardy explorations of the
Grand Canyon of the Colorado in the late 1860's and 1870's. The awful
gorges of the Colorado were common gossip in the Powell-Davis families.
And in 1902 Arthur Powell Davis, having taken a civil engineering degree
at Columbian (now George Washington) University, and having spent several
years as hydrographer with the abortive Nicaragua Canal Commission, began
to make his own rich contribution to the Colorado's history. He studied
the endless, mud-shwishing Gulliver sprawled across the sun-scorched
wastes of the Southwest. Now it moved in perpetual twilight under precipices
as terrifying as the cliffs of dream. Now it wound into remorseless sunlight
between lonely rock horizons upon whose brows you half expected to see
the stain of perspiration. Near the southern tip of Nevada the river
entered Black Canyon. The walls of Black Canyon are considerably higher
than the Woolworth Building and they diverge enough to be thoroughly
baked by the sun. There is no hotter or more desolate scene on the Colorado
- a turgid stream in a towering furnace of stone, a parching parody of
all that the sweet word river has meant to the poets.
There in Black Canyon Arthur Powell Davis had his vision. For twenty succeeding years he gave his finest energies t the notion of the dam. Boulder Dam became a local and then a national issue. It involved scores of prominent Americans in disputes political, financial, and technical. But in the jagged valleys of the Colorado or in Washington or anywhere else there was no dispute about one fact: Boulder Dam was fundamentally the conception of Arthur Powell Davis; it was everlastingly based on his monumental engineering report. In 1923 the wrangling got so hectic in the office o Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work that Mr. Davis resigned his positions as Director and Chief Engineer to the Reclamation Service. Gray and gentle and disillusioned, he went to California, where he worked on local aqueducts, and to Turkestan, where he was the Soviets' Chief Consulting Engineer on irrigation.
For ten years Boulder Dam proceeded without him. The money was at long
last
appropriated, actual blasting was begun. In California, far from these
detonations, Mr. Davis' health began to fail. The Prosperity Party changed
the name of the project to Hoover Dam. Mr. Davis' name, which had never
had much advertisement in the first place, dropped out of memory as quickly
as that of any ill and retired American. On June first of this year the
first buckets of concrete were poured into the hugest mold ever conceived;
the Colorado already writhed helplessly in a strait-jacket of stone and
steel. At length in mid-July the forgotten Mr. Davis received his own
particular New Deal. The new Administration concluded perhaps that just
dues were better late than never, and Mr. Davis appointment as consulting
Engineer on Boulder Dam was announced by Secretary Ickes. And at seventy-two
Arthur Powell Davis returned, or was returned, to his vision. His health
was too delicate to permit much actual field work in the Molochian jaws
of Black Canyon. But on the Washington records he was back at what any
of the boys on the canyon will be first to admit was his job. By 1936,
seventeen months or better ahead of schedule, Mr. Arthur Powell Davis'
vision will stand materialized across the broken back of the Colorado,
a barrier so vast that few men without seeing it will be able to sense
its size.
Last Reviewed: 9/10/2004