 |
Transcript for Hoover Dam Construction, segment 02 of 17
For untold centuries, the turbid waters of the Colorado River battered their way through the forbidding canyons of its seventeen hundred mile course, traversing the arid southwest, for the most part little known except to the native Indians and a few parties of intrepid explorers. Draining a vast region of mountain and desert, entering seven of the largest western states, it poured its water southward into the Gulf of California, carrying into its delta a tremendous volume of silt and periodically overflowing the prosperous towns and rich agricultural districts near its mouth with devastating floods. From the time of its discovery, it remained a challenge to engineers who sought to control it until the enactment in nineteen twenty-eight of the Boulder Canyon Project Act, authorizing the construction of Boulder Dam. In Black Canyon where the Colorado River forms the boundary between Nevada and Arizona in the very heart of the great desert of the southwest, the United States Department of the Interior, through its Bureau of Reclamation, was directed to proceed with the construction of this mightiest of dams.