If these walls could talk

Kimberley McGee

Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2001 | 8:40 a.m.

When they heard the sound of a falling wrench crashing down the tall, concrete tunnels, workers inside the dark passage would flatten themselves against the wall of the Boulder Dam intake.

They prayed the metal tool, falling fast, would miss them one more time.

"When we were out there building, there was no safety officer, you looked out for yourself because nobody else would," said Tommy Nelson, an 88-year-old former dam construction worker.

Nelson is one of a dwindling group of men and women who lived through the heat, dust and dangerous conditions to build what was, in 1931, the Boulder Dam (later renamed Hoover Dam after President Herbert Hoover), a marvel of technology and a good job opportunity.

In May the University of Nevada Press will re-release the 1994 book "Building Hoover Dam: An Oral History of the Great Depression" by Andrew J. Dunar and local historian Dennis McBride, which chronicles and celebrates the lives of the dam laborers.

"The idea that starting from nothing in the desert and building a dam and a city out of those conditions is a very dramatic and appealing story," said Dunar, a professor of history at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.

Historians had sorely overlooked the monolithic dam, Dunar said, when he began his research in the early '80s.

"It was a wonderful story, and a story that hadn't been told yet," Dunar said.

In fact, it was a historian's dream come true.

The research led him to McBride, who had taped interviews with dam laborers, and the two historians pooled their efforts. To complete the book, they cut, pasted and critiqued their manuscript by mail, and Dunar traveled between Boulder City and Huntsville during the summer months.

Meanwhile author Joseph Stevens published his dam endeavor in 1988, "Hoover Dam: An American Adventure," a narrative history. McBride led the New Mexico author to rich sources of Nevada history and provided photos for his publication, Stevens said.

"I wrote that book, but Dennis is the authority, no question," Stevens said.

Interest in Hoover Dam has increased in recent years, Stevens said, with specials on PBS and the A&E and Discovery cable channels, which is no surprise to the author.

"It's an amazing structure, an American icon," Stevens said. "You ask yourself, 'How on Earth did something like this get built here under those conditions?' "

History speaks

McBride, also the 1993 author of the Boulder City/Hoover Dam Museum book, "The Boulder Dam Hotel," was awed by the men's recollections of accidents and deaths at the construction site.

"A lot of what happened didn't make it into the newspaper accounts, which is what historians rely on," McBride said. "That's why this oral history is so important. These are the people speaking for themselves."

The 46-year-old Boulder City native said it's important for the world to know the stories of the blood, sweat and lives that went into building the 726-foot-tall structure while the country scrambled to climb out of the Depression.

"People came out here and were shocked at the living and working conditions they saw," McBride said. "But they were starving to death and it was the only place to get a job."

The dam broke ground in the spring of 1931 and was completed by 1935 -- early and under budget. Nearly 100 workers lost their lives due to the unsafe working conditions that paid $4 a day -- a nice wage if you could get it during the Depression.

Former bankers, lawyers and other professionals who had lost their livelihoods due to the stock market collapse on Oct. 28, 1929, hoped the dam project would give them enough money to feed their families and to possibly start over.

"These men just hit the road," McBride said. "They wandered out here because this was the only place they could get work. They didn't know what they were getting into."

One account in particular, from Dean Pulsipher who has since died, haunts McBride.

A 30-foot-in-diameter pipe carrying a handful of men was moved across the canyon to be fitted into a tunnel inside the rock walls. While the pipe was inched in with a system of pulleys and levers, one of the pulleys broke. The 200-ton pipe careened down the face of the canyon wall.

"There were people in this pipe and they rode it as it tumbled down through that tunnel," McBride said. "It killed a couple of men."

Those deaths, and those of others, did not stop more men from filling the empty positions.

They came in droves for a job that promised a paycheck and a home.

Deadly summer

The dam employed 6,000 workers at a time and was a year behind on providing adequate housing. Shantytowns began to appear along the Colorado River as new arrivals tried to scrape a living and a home out of the desert.

The summer of 1931 is referred to as the "Summer of Death," McBride said, because the daily temperature usually swelled to 140 degrees in the canyon and there was little shelter from the heat.

"It was a social crisis of the (highest) degree," McBride said.

By 1932 Las Vegas and Boulder City had managed to quickly construct homes, apartments or rooms for most of the men, although housing remained tight throughout the depression and World War II.

"The only people who could live in Boulder City were those who had jobs," until 1959 when the government released control of the city, McBride said.

The common thread of the dam created a tight community in the company town.

There were times when the sirens would sound, McBride said, and housewives would watch as a police car sped up the hill to the home sites, waiting to see if this time it would stop at their home.

"They all just knew it was coming to their door to tell them their husband had died on the dam," McBride said.

Grieving families were quickly evacuated to make room for another laborer.

Through all of the difficulties, most of the men who worked on the dam knew it was for the prosperity of the country.

"They had a sense of being involved with a historic endeavor," McBride said.

Carving out a life

For Nelson, starvation brought him to his precarious position working in the Hoover Dam tunnels.

"I was just a dumb kid and I had just got out of high school and I needed a job," Nelson said.

Nelson worked on the dam -- initially as a builder, later as an electrician and foreman -- from the time it broke ground to his retirement in 1969.

"That dam down there has been a part of me," he said.

Nelson watched men fall, get injured and die on the job. More often than not, however, it was a silent, odorless killer that brought these strong men to their knees.

"You hear so many people died from pneumonia, but it was carbon monoxide that took 'em out," he said.

The tunnels had no ventilation and filled with deadly exhaust from the trucks that hauled debris and equipment.

Lee Tillman was one of those truck drivers. For $5 a day in 1932, it was an envious position.

"It was bad in the tunnels, but I didn't have to stay in the tunnels," the 88-year-old retiree said. "I would go in and get the debris from digging the tunnels. I wouldn't be in there over 15, 20 minutes and I'd be out in the fresh air hauling the truck to the dump a mile away in the canyon."

Tillman worked for the dam in some capacity throughout his life. He sent for his high school sweetheart, Noma, in 1934 and they married.

"I wouldn't have married him if he didn't have a good job," Noma Tillman said.

The couple lived in different one-room apartments in Las Vegas until 1939, when a home was finally available in Boulder City.

Noma Tillman, 84, remembers moving into the two-room house.

"There were about 20 what you'd call houses, I guess, just set out in the desert," she said. "It was terribly hot, no shade. It was really horrible but we couldn't find anywhere else to live in Boulder City."

McKeeversville, a survey-turned-tent camp on the outskirts of the town, was a reminder of the young couple's good fortune no matter how rough it may have seemed at times.

"A lot of people lived there in tents," Noma Tillman said. "We felt lucky we weren't in one."

Historic monolith

The completion of the dam aided war efforts in the '40s. It supplied most of the water and electricity for the war factories in Henderson and Los Angeles.

"If the dam had not been finished, and all that power and water was not available, you could debate if we would have won the war as soon as we did -- or ever," McBride said.

On Dec. 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was bombed and the United States effectively entered the war, tours of the Hoover Dam were halted and the military moved in. Men in uniform were posted inside, along the entrances and in gun towers on either side of the dam.

Fear of sabotage to the dam was high during the war.

A fence was built on the Nevada and Arizona entrances to the dam, and cars were escorted across with a military jeep at the front, middle and end of the convoy.

"Windows had to be rolled up tight, no photos could be taken," McBride said. "They even dropped anti-mine nets in the lake upstream of the dam."

The dam was constructed to provide jobs when the country needed work and to give a much-needed source of energy to a burgeoning Southwest.

Today the dam supplies power to most of Los Angeles and has been upgraded to meet the demands of the growing desert and Southern California population.

Compared to its heyday, the dam's contribution as a power source has diminished -- but not the fascination.

"It's a feat we would never see (completed) today," McBride said.

archive