Hoover Dam was built in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River between 1931 and 1936, and the Bureau of Reclamation kept albums documenting the work. The National Archives holds them, and the pictures are in the public domain. These eight follow the job from a desert town built for the workers to the dam’s upstream face in the spring of 1935.
Boulder City, from the air
On December 24, 1932, someone aimed a camera down at Boulder City, Nevada, the government town built to house the workers on Hoover Dam. From the air it is a tidy grid of buildings dropped onto an empty desert, with only a few roads leading anywhere else.
The workers’ double-decker bus
This double-decked coach carried Six Companies workmen from Boulder City to the dam, and the record says it held 150 men. It was photographed on July 27, 1933, rolling through a cut in the canyon wall with every seat and rail taken, like the commute of a small town.
High-scalers on the canyon wall
In July 1932 high-scalers were at work on ropes some 550 feet above the Colorado River at the Arizona intake towers site, according to the record. Their job was to strip loose rock from the canyon wall before any concrete went in. From here they look like beads on a thread.
Inside diversion tunnel No. 2
The Colorado had to be moved out of the way before the dam could rise, and tunnels bored through the canyon walls took the river. This view from July 1, 1932, shows the side-wall concrete in place in tunnel No. 2, with a row of lights and a wet floor doubling the glare.
A cableway tower on rails
The caption is wonderfully plain: a complete view of a movable cableway tower. Cableways carried buckets and equipment across the canyon, and this tower stood on rails so it could be shifted along the site. Two loads hang from the cable overhead, and the people at its foot are the size of pebbles.
Pouring a form
On September 27, 1933, a bucket sluiced concrete into a form at Hoover Dam while workers prepared to flatten out the pour. The dam was built as a stack of separate concrete columns, each filled bucket by bucket, and the men with long-handled tools are waiting for the next load.
The dam from the cableway tower
This telephoto view of the dam was taken on August 30, 1933, from the control tower of the 150-ton cableway. From that height the work looks like a checkerboard of forms and columns, and it is hard to believe it will become one smooth curve.
The upstream face, May 1935
The record calls this the rarely seen upstream face of Hoover Dam, in May 1935, the side that would soon disappear under Lake Mead. The intake towers stand at both ends, and the curved wall between them is almost blank.
