ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work is especially indebted to two vibrant and illuminating books. Building Hoover Dam: An Oral History of the Great Depression, by Andrew J. Dunar and Dennis McBride, projects the varied voices of the dam workers and their families. Hoover Dam: An American Adventure, by Joseph E. Stevens, describes in compelling detail the determined effort to build the world's largest dam in one of the nation's bleakest spots during the country's worst depression. Quotations from these and other works are used with permission. INTRODUCTION The world watched when Six Companies contracted in 1931 to build the Hoover Dam. Company officials hired photographer Walter J. Lubken, and perhaps others, to graphically capture every phase of the arduous and complex construction. These photos would become known for a cheerful machismo that revealed the heat, dust, and danger so inherent to this massive effort. After the dam was dedicated, photographic scrapbooks were presented to Six Companies officials and to the widows of William H. Wattis and Edmund 0. Wattis, each of whom had served as president of the company. As young men, in 1900, the Wattis brothers (including a third brother, Warren L. Wattis) and bankers David Eccles and Thomas Dee founded the Utah Construction Company in Ogden, Utah. After establishing Utah Construction as a dam builder in the West, the Wattis brothers led the consortium that became Six Companies in presenting the United States Bureau of Reclamation with a winning bid to tame the Colorado River. A complete set of the Hoover Dam Scrapbooks came to the Stewart Library Special Collections in 1990, a gift from Dorothy Hetzel, a granddaughter of William H. Wattis. Then, in 1999, a vast collection containing some half million photographs was donated by Utah International, Inc., and BHP Proprietaries, Ltd., facilitated by Edmund Wattis Littlefield, a former company president. Hoover Dam Scrapbooks also were included in the Utah Construction/Utah International Collection. Images from the Hoover Dam scrapbooks are joined here by several photographs graciously provided by the Boulder City Museum in Boulder City, Nevada, and used with permission. Many activities occurred simultaneously in and around Black Canyon during the early 1930s. For the ease of the reader, the photographs in this volume are divided into four sequential sections: Beginnings (page 3); Boulder City (page 19); Excavation (page 37); and Construction (page 61).