Why America's Hoover Dam Contains Nine Bodies Still Sealed In Its Concrete

21000 American workers built the dam across the 5 years of active construction. The workforce was drawn primarily from Depression era Americans who traveled from every state to compete for the highest paying construction jobs available. Skilled workers earned 5 dollars and 50 cents per day. Common laborers earned 4 dollars. High scalers, who worked on the canyon walls at heights up to 700 feet above the canyon floor, earned 5 dollars and 60 cents, the highest wage on the project. 9 workers who fell into the wet concrete during the pours were never recovered. Their bodies remain sealed inside America's Hoover Dam today, ninety years later. And on December twentieth, 1935, a young Bureau of Reclamation engineer named Patrick Tierney fell from an intake tower and died at exactly the same location where his father had died, thirteen years to the day earlier. This is the story of the largest concrete structure America ever built. =========================================================== SOURCES =========================================================== BOOKS AND ACADEMIC WORK Stevens, Joseph E. "Hoover Dam: An American Adventure." University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. The definitive scholarly and popular history of the Hoover Dam construction. Standard reference on the workers, the construction, and the political history. Hiltzik, Michael. "Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century." Free Press, 2010. Comprehensive history focused on the political and economic dimensions of the project. McBride, Dennis. "In the Beginning: A History of Boulder City, Nevada." Boulder City Museum and Historical Association, 1981. History of the planned town built for the Hoover Dam workers. Rocca, Al M. "America's Shrine to Democracy: A History of the Hoover Dam." Redding Museum of Art and History, 1992. Photographic and cultural history. Allen, Marion V. "Hoover Dam and Boulder City." Redding Times, 1983. Personal memoir by a former high scaler who worked on the construction. Dunar, Andrew J. and Dennis McBride. "Building Hoover Dam: An Oral History of the Great Depression." Twayne Publishers, 1993. Oral history collection with worker interviews. Wiley, Peter and Robert Gottlieb. "Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West." University of Arizona Press, 1985. Broader context on the Bureau of Reclamation and Colorado River development. Reisner, Marc. "Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water." Penguin Books, 1993. Standard reference on Bureau of Reclamation history and the politics of Western water. PRIMARY SOURCES AND ARCHIVES United States Bureau of Reclamation archives at the Denver Federal Center. https://www.usbr.gov/ Frank Crowe Papers, University of Nevada Reno Special Collections. Six Companies Incorporated records, Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley. https://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ Hoover Dam Construction Records, National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/ Boulder City Museum and Historical Association archives. https://bcmha.org/ Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. https://hoover.archives.gov/ NEWSPAPER COVERAGE Las Vegas Age and Las Vegas Review Journal archives, extensive contemporary coverage. Los Angeles Times archives, coverage from the political authorization through the completion. New York Times archives, national coverage of the largest federal project of the era.