Floyd
E. Dominy at Hoover Dam. Dominy later became Commissioner of the
Bureau of Reclamation and served under Presidents Eisenhower,
Kennedy, and Johnson. Courtesy of US Department of Interior, Bureau
of Reclamation.
To
some people they are beautiful engineering structures that signify
human ingenuity and the power of people to control nature. To
others they are massive symbols of hubris.
Phoenix
Gazette
headline, August 1940. News of Word War I was trumped by news
of a proposal to bring Colorado River water to the desert. Courtesy
of Five Quail Books
"We
simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never
do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means
of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of
the geography of hope."
Wallace
Stegner
|
What ideas
do dams, ditches, and diversions symbolize and embody?
Hoover
Dam at night. The glamour of the 726-foot-high
dam lifted the spirits of America during the Depression
and has been electrifying the West ever since.
Courtesy of US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation.
Controlling
water flow was the first step in building the life Westerners live
today. The modern period of dam building began with the Reclamation
Act of 1902, which financed the construction of the Newlands Projects
in northern Nevada and the Theodore Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River
in Arizona. Federal financing continues today with the construction
of the Central Utah Project. This period of engineering resulted in
the production of a massive plumbing system that enabled water to
be taken where and when it was needed to power hydroelectric generation,
irrigate agricultural economies, supply water to cities, and create
places for recreation.
Dams
are major architectural statements on the vast horizontal landscape
of the West. Hoover Dam has been called the Great Pyramid of the
American West. Now that the era of arresting rivers via big dams
is ending, we are able to reflect on how we balance water use and
ecological preservation.
High-scaler on
Hoover Dam. High-scalers were the most admired workers because of
the danger of dangling from ropes, but 5,000 people worked for three
years around the clock to complete the dam. They were under contract
with Six Companies, who became a prominent developer of projects
in the West and throughout the world. Courtesy of US Department
of Interior, Bureau of Reclamation.
|
