"They called us cliff dwellers because the dormitories were built on stilts at the side of the canyon. The mess hall was down on the road level, and they had wooden stairways up the side of the canyon wall there to these dormitories up in the canyon there. The first dormitory on the hill was the cook shack dormitory, where the cooks and all the waiters stayed, and there were three or four other dormitories behind us. We traveled up and down that hill on those wooden steps three or four times a day, going back and forth to the mess hall on the road level below."1' - Bob Parker "[The government contracted for] a transmission line to deliver power to the site from generating stations at Victorville and San Bernadino, California, the latter more than two hundred miles away. The contract for furnishing power was awarded jointly to the Southern Sierras Power Company and the Nevada-California Power Company... at a cost of approximately $1,500,000... Despite the fact that a considerable portion of the route was across mountainous country, the 193-mile line from Victorville to the substation was put in place at the rate of 1.45 miles a day, which is said to constitute a record for such work... "Power was turned on on June 25, [1931], beating by several days the time limit of 240 days allowed for designing and building the system. " - C. H. Vivian Increasing desperation in the ragtag camps near the dam site prompted President Herbert Hoover to order that work at the dam site commence even though Boulder City was not yet ready to house workers and their families. Six Companies hurriedly nailed together the River Camp dormitories to shelter around 480 single men. With the road into the canyon bottom still unfinished, Six Companies built barges to float crews and equipment to the dam site. The river could not be diverted around Black Canyon, yet the riverbed must be exposed, pumped dry, and excavated down to bedrock before the foundation could be laid. Thus Six Companies' primary and most difficult task became drilling four diversion tunnels through the cliffs to lure the river from its bed.