“The Greatest Dam in the World”: The Troubling History of the Hoover Dam and the Taming of the Colorado River
Ryan Tenner
Running through the heart of the arid American Southwest is the Colorado River, a powerful waterway that tens of millions of people rely on for drinking water, irrigation, and electricity. Its relationship with humankind is one of increasing dependence, beginning from minimal use to a modern severe exploitation. Over time, federally sponsored infrastructure projects like the Hoover Dam have subdued the Colorado River, while simultaneously displacing Indian societies in the region and causing immense environmental destruction.
The Southern Paiutes
Before any white settlers had set foot in the Southwest or visited the Colorado River, the region was home to the Southern Paiute Indians. Native to the lands alongside the river where Nevada, Utah, and Arizona now meet, the Southern Paiutes maintained specialized techniques for surviving in arid and seemingly inhospitable conditions (Figure 3). A nomadic people, they spent months traveling in carefully predetermined circuits in pursuit of sufficient food sources, especially plants like the yucca and Joshua tree. Those circuits--and therefore their ability to find food and survive--hinged on their comprehensive understanding of the growing patterns and locations of the region’s plant life. The Paiutes employed the plants they gathered for all that they were worth: not just for nutrition but for tools, clothing, and hunting equipment. They tended to search for small animals like birds, rodents, and lizards, but also hunted larger game like bears and deer (Powell, 1971, pp. 38-49). Their knowledge of the land and its resources extended also to drinking water: rather than relying on major rivers like the Colorado (which were located too far away from their main food sources), the Paiutes maintained an acute awareness of the locations of springs, puddles, and even the smallest crevices from which to draw water (Knack, 2001, p. 13).
The Paiutes’ existence in the Southwest came with clear, but altogether minimal, impacts on the land. Where the scarce resource of water could be found, for instance, they tended small gardens of corn, beans, and gourds to supplement their diets. Such gardens were typically under an acre in size and supported by irrigation channels they dug from small tributaries (Knack, 2001, p. 15). These operations, while definite and present, did not seriously alter the local environment, as the manual labor required to maintain them would have been too onerous for the Paiutes had they been any larger in scale.
Early White Settlement
The Southern Paiutes first encountered ethnic Europeans in 1776, when Spanish missionaries traveled through their lands. Although the Spaniards did not establish much of a presence in Paiute territory, they spread word of the geography of the region that was later followed by American fur trappers and westbound immigrants. Whites often kidnapped and forced Paiutes to guide them toward food and water sources, and large numbers of the Indians--especially women and children--were sold into the slave trade well into the 19th century (Knack, 2001, pp. 30-35). The arrival of the Mormons in the 1850s spurred the first permanent white settlements on Southern Paiute lands, which quickly spread throughout the region. Miners also arrived at this time, founding the town of Pioche, Nevada, in 1864 (Knack, 2001, pp. 48-53, 100-102) (Figure 2). As settlements developed, the already-low population of Paiutes fell from around 10,000 when the Spaniards first arrived to less than 1,000 by the 1880s (LaMore, 2021).
The Mormons maintained a delicate relationship with the Paiutes, reshaping their land and threatening them with violence while simultaneously baptizing them en masse (Brown, 1857). Other settlers were more directly hostile toward them, seeing them as an obstacle to urban and agricultural expansion. In Pioche, settlers petitioned the federal government against a proposed Paiute reservation set to be located on the fertile Muddy River valley, arguing that they deserved the land for agriculture more than the Indians did (Pioche Daily Record, 1873).
The rapid expansion of white settlement meant fundamental changes to the relationships between the land of the Southwest and the people living on it. At first, the Paiutes’ relationship with the land was one of deliberate, constrained dependence: whatever resources they extracted were just enough to allow them to survive, since gathering anything beyond that would have required needless expenditures of energy in the harsh desert climate. As mentioned, their agricultural pursuits were limited to minor gardens, since gathering wild plants and hunting animals was generally less burdensome than maintaining crops for an extended period of time (Knack, 2001, pp. 14-16). The Southern Paiutes found success in their subsistence lifestyle because of their precise knowledge of the plants and landscape that they called home. But for the influx of whites moving into the region lacking that knowledge, such a lifestyle was wholly unfit.
Instead, settlers perceived the land as a commodity waiting to be developed and shaped to their economic goals. Whether that meant extracting resources or building towns, their immediate priority was to swiftly establish ways to feed an expanding population. The best way to do that, in their eyes, was to rely not on hunting and gathering as the Paiutes would, but on large-scale agriculture. Therefore, they constructed a vast irrigation system out of the handful of rivers and streams surrounding them and worked on the land to grow crops (Doyle, 2018, p. 137). The continuous rush of settlers pouring in provided the labor force for--and simultaneously gave purpose to--the development of new infrastructure in the Southwest that could allow whites to settle the land as they saw fit. By 1865, the Mormons had dug over 1,000 miles of irrigation canals and built numerous dams, etching a drastic mark on the land of the--remaining--Southern Paiutes (Danver & Burch, 2011, p. 36).
Federal Pursuits
To facilitate new settlements and respond to the increasing demand for water in the Southwest, the federal government enacted the Desert Land Act in 1877, granting ownership of 160-acre plots of arid land to any citizen that could successfully irrigate them within three years. However, as pointed out by explorer and Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell, who completed multiple expeditions throughout the Colorado River Basin, individual farmers lacked the organization and capital to construct sufficient irrigation infrastructure in the desert (Powell, 1879, pp. 3-11). Therefore, limited progress could be made in irrigating the Southwest. In 1894, the federal government again tried to encourage widescale irrigation by passing the Carey Act, which sought to incentivize individual states to develop irrigation projects; again, though, progress was slow.
Advancements in water infrastructure in the Southwest finally saw daylight after the formation of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in 1902. Reclamation, a federal agency founded to manage and direct irrigation projects throughout the country, was designed to bring cohesion to water management and organize the allocation of water resources. As the population along the Colorado River continued to expand, the network of existing canals there was only so capable of meeting the growing water demands--an issue worsened by the lack of water-storage infrastructure to fall back on in years of limited river flow (Doyle, 2018, pp. 136-139). Reclamation served to initiate and strengthen that irrigation infrastructure and received significant support from the federal government to do so. Within just the first few decades of the bureau’s existence, Congress approved about seventy of its proposals to create dams and irrigation systems across the nation, especially in the Southwest (Danver & Burch, 2011, p.38).
Interstate Agreement
Ultimately, the Southwest’s vision was to tame the Colorado River and ensure that it could reliably provide water for settlers whenever necessary. Dams, reservoirs, and other water infrastructure projects on the river were the means to those ends. But once humans could control the flow and storage of a river’s water, they would inherently control the allocation of that water as well. The seven Colorado River Basin states, self-interested and keenly aware of each others’ desires for water, quickly realized that political cooperation would be necessary to ensure diplomatic management of the river. Otherwise, future infrastructure projects regulating the flow of the Colorado would be subject to endless controversies between the states over their competing rights to divert the water.
Therefore, in 1921, the seven states agreed to form the Colorado River Commission, chaired by Secretary of Commerce (and future president) Herbert Hoover. Meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the commission’s mandate was to determine how much water each state could legally draw from the river so that future questions of water allocation could be resolved. Indeed, after tense deliberation and concessions, the commission eventually agreed on the Colorado River Compact of 1922, a short but significant document that arranged each states’ rights to the river water (Doyle, 2018, pp. 129-135). The compact expressly stated that reserving the water of the Colorado River in its natural flow “would seriously limit the development of its Basin,” so it ought to be employed by humans for “domestic, agricultural, and power purposes.” That statement set the stage for the Bureau of Reclamation’s forthcoming infrastructure projects on the river and crystallized the government’s perspective: the Colorado River was not a natural wonder to be preserved, but a source of immense economic potential to be harnessed to the fullest extent.
Birth of the Boulder Dam
Even before becoming chair of the Colorado River Commission, Secretary Hoover had called for the construction of a dam on the Colorado River to help bring it under human control and induce economic development in the Southwest (Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, n.d.). Hoover’s vision became reality within only a few years of the creation of the Colorado River Compact with the passage of the 1928 Boulder Canyon Project Act. The act allocated $165,000,000 to build a dam at Boulder Canyon, situated along the Colorado River on the Nevada-Arizona border (Figure 2). The dam, planned to be Reclamation’s most ambitious infrastructure project yet, would improve flood control and irrigation management for farms in the Southwest and produce electricity via hydropower. Furthermore, it would create thousands of jobs during a period of high unemployment through the Great Depression. In short, it would fulfill all the economic purposes of the Colorado River--domestic, agricultural, and power--expounded in the 1922 compact.
In 1931, the town of Boulder City, Nevada, was founded adjacent to the canyon to facilitate the housing of dam workers; railroads, electrical lines, highways, and water supplies rapidly descended upon the town (Figures 2 & 5). Construction of the dam began that year, directed by Reclamation and organized by a group of unified construction corporations together named the Six Companies. To build the dam, workers constructed a cofferdam--an artificial dry area created by blocking off part of the river--and bored four 56-foot diameter tunnels through the sides of the canyons to divert the river water while construction took place (Figures 8 & 9). Workers also built two suspension bridges traversing the canyon to move supplies back and forth (Young, 1932) (Figure 6).
The Benefits
By 1935, Boulder Dam--renamed Hoover Dam after its original proponent--and its accompanying hydroelectric power plant were finished (Figures 10 & 11). The project provided much-needed economic support for the country during the Great Depression, providing over 5,000 jobs to construction workers in a given month and many thousands more to those in manufacturing positions (National Park Service, 2018). In his speech inaugurating the dam on September 30, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt argued that such employment would stimulate the economy by putting money into circulation (Figure 12). Beyond those immediate effects, Roosevelt explained that the dam would save the country money by preventing flood damage, and stimulate growth by irrigating “thousands of acres of tillable land and… generat[ing] electricity to turn the wheels of many factories and illuminate countless homes.” It would also facilitate precious metal and natural resource extraction efforts in the surrounding areas, providing even more jobs and development.
Upon completion, the reservoir behind the dam, Lake Mead, could store up to 30 million acre-feet of water (the volume that it would take to cover 30 million acres of land with a foot of water) (Figure 2). That quantity, which equals two years’ worth of Colorado River flow, was fifty percent more than initially planned (Doyle, 2018, p. 138). In his speech, Roosevelt exclaimed that it was the “greatest dam in the world.” He had good reason to make such a claim, as the dam, power plant, and reservoir were each the largest in existence at the time, and the entire project was completed tens of millions of dollars under budget. Today, the Hoover Dam is responsible for the electrical power of over 1.3 million Americans in the Southwest, and Lake Mead provides drinking water for over twenty-five million. Several canals have been constructed out of Lake Mead, providing for the irrigation of two million acres of desert land in the region. Additionally, Hoover Dam has become a staple attraction of the American Southwest, welcoming seven million visitors annually as of 2018 (National Park Service, 2018).
The Hoover Dam was the first of many Reclamation-led projects throughout the Colorado River Basin. Reflecting both Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for progress and the Colorado River Commission’s vision of taming the waterway under human control, the bureau sought to create a network of dams to precisely control the flow and storage of river water. Doing so would ensure that settlement could continue in the Southwest without being subject to the caprices of nature. Forces out of human control could, in theory, push the river into an unexpected course and cause immense flooding. Conversely, the river could suffer a severe drought like that of the summer of 1934, which cost the Imperial Valley of California ten million dollars in crop losses. As Roosevelt argued in his speech, such crises could be prevented by developing infrastructure to store and distribute water across the desert Southwest. Therefore, in 1956, the federal government enacted the Colorado River Storage Project Act, authorizing the construction of “a variety of dams, reservoirs, powerplants, transmission facilities and related works” on the river. These included the Glen Canyon Dam farther upstream and other engineering projects that, together, enabled the United States’s domination of the Colorado River and catalyzed the Southwest’s economic development.
Population growth in the Southwest was now almost inevitable, as entrepreneurial pursuits in agriculture and other industries could flourish unrestrained in the desert. Farms now had a reliable source of irrigation. Cities like Las Vegas now had easy access to electrical power. Affordable housing and a new demand for labor now facilitated the movement of both Americans and foreigners to the region. Indeed, the population of the desert Southwest expanded dramatically in the latter half of the 20th century: it grew by 70% from 1950-1960 and continued to outpace the national growth rate by at least a factor of two in every decade since then (US Census Bureau, 2019) (Figure 13). Examining Nevada alone, the state had a population of under 7,000 when Pioche was founded in the 1860s. Less than a century later in 1950, the state had over 160,000 residents, a 23-fold increase. In 2000, the population reached nearly two million, and today it has surpassed three million (US Census Bureau, 2000) (Figure 14). Urban and suburban growth in the Southwest was no accident or natural process, but the end result of decades of government-funded infrastructure projects intended to bolster the economy. Today, the initial visions of the Colorado River Commission, Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, and the Bureau of Reclamation have been realized.
The Costs
The construction of the Hoover and other dams was a monumental economic success for the United States, especially during the Great Depression--but for the Southern Paiutes and the natural environment, that value was not shared.
The most immediate effect of constructing the Hoover Dam was the flooding of lands previously relied on by Indians for food and settlement (and by animal and plant life for habitat) as river water filled up behind the dam to form Lake Mead. The Southern Paiute tribe had no say in the flooding of its valleys to create reservoirs nor the rise of cities surrounding federal projects, which both contributed to a near-total loss of its native lands. As a result, the federal government designated a small handful of reservations for the Paiutes on which they were forcibly taught Western livelihoods and agricultural methods (Figure 3). The goal was to ensure that they stayed confined on those lands and therefore avoided contact with growing white settlements in the region. However, the reservations were established on cheap, poor land, and whites systematically denied Paiutes access to irrigation canals and drinking water (Knack, 2001, pp. 169-170, 303-304). Therefore, though on paper the Paiutes were assigned to reservations, they did not feel strongly tied to them and frequently left to find work elsewhere. They faced widespread poverty, often seeking employment on farms or through government agencies to sustain themselves. In the 1930s, as white laborers descended upon the site that would become Hoover Dam, the Indians found it even more difficult to acquire jobs, only worsening their economic position (Knack, 2001, p. 234). Today, although population estimates are somewhat difficult to determine, about 1,000-2,000 Paiutes continue to live in the Southwest, in communities scattered both on and off reservations (Hanes & Hillstrom, n.d.).
The Hoover Dam and the rest of the network of Colorado River infrastructure projects have also imposed environmental consequences on the Southwest. Before humanity sought to dominate the river, its delta between Baja California and the rest of Mexico was a pristine natural region. In 1922, while government officials met in Santa Fe to divvy up the Colorado’s water, conservationist Aldo Leopold explored the river’s delta by canoe and noted that he saw virtually no trace of humankind anywhere on his journey. Rather, he encountered a vast meandering of jungles and lagoons brimming with birds, deer, and fish of all sorts. Today, such lushness no longer exists. Decades of upstream diversion and storage of the Colorado River’s water for human purposes have pushed the downstream wetlands of the river’s delta to a state of extreme dryness, devastating the ecosystem and endangering the organisms that live there. By 2000, the Colorado had become so over-exploited that the river did not even reach its delta, leaving a vast barren area in its stead (NASA Earth Observatory, 2014).
Realizing the environmental damage unfolding, in 2014 the United States and Mexico agreed to send a pulse flow--a designated amount of stored water released out of the dams into the river--to attempt to restore the delta. Authorized under Minute 319 of the 1944 United States-Mexico Treaty on Utilization of Waters of the Colorado, the experimental release of 105,000 acre-feet of river water (which amounts to just 1% of what used to flow through the delta) increased vegetation along the river’s path by 43% and catalyzed ecological activity there for a few months (NASA Earth Observatory, 2014) (Figures 15 & 16). Encouraged by that success, the two governments then agreed in 2017 on Minute 323, which arranged for 210,000 acre-feet to be released into the Colorado River delta over the course of nine years. So far, the delta has seen something of a revival, with the Colorado once again reaching the Gulf of California and animal and plant life returning to wetlands there (James, 2023). However, the delta is still nothing like what Aldo Leopold depicted, and much more must be done for its restoration.
The Megadrought
The drying of the Colorado River delta, while a major concern in its own right, is in many ways a symptom of a much greater environmental crisis: a megadrought. Since the beginning of the current century, overconsumption by humans and dramatic losses in snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains--which feed the Colorado about 70% of its water--have resulted in a prolonged and severe decline in the river’s water flows (Petach & Mateo, 2023). While periodic conditions of dry weather and low precipitation are to be expected in the Southwest, extensive scientific analysis of the current megadrought points to human-driven climate change as responsible for about 46% of its severity (Williams et al., 2020).
A useful measure to understand the magnitude of this crisis is through the water levels at Lake Mead. Full pool status--the maximum elevation the lake's surface can attain--is a bit over 1,200 feet above sea level. The last time the lake was that high was in the 1980s. Since then, and especially since 2000, the water levels have steadily decreased, reaching a record low in July 2022 of 1,040 feet (Lake Mead Water Database, 2024). That drop in water level is physically apparent in any modern-day photo of the lake, as the canyon walls show a clear discoloration from where the water once was (Figure 17). For Hoover Dam’s hydroelectricity plant to operate, water levels must be above 950 feet above sea level. Below that, the lake reaches inactive pool status and the millions who rely on the dam for power will be out of luck. And if the lake falls below 895 feet above sea level, it will reach dead pool status--where water cannot be released through the dam--preventing the river from providing irrigation and drinking water to farms, consumers, and the river delta downstream (National Park Service, 2022). As of 2024, the lake has risen to the range of 1,070 feet above sea level, but overall trends show a clear decline in the past 24 years. Reaching inactive or dead pool status remains a serious potential for Lake Mead, and even more so for Lake Powell farther upstream: in August 2022, its surface dropped to within 44 feet of inactive pool levels (Major & Miller, 2022).
The dire consequences of this megadrought have already forced several states in the Southwest to take drastic responsive measures. For example, though the Southern Nevada Water Authority--a government agency designed to manage water resources in the Las Vegas area--has directed water conservation efforts there since the 1990s, the drought has necessitated increasingly stringent regulations in recent years. In 2021, it implemented a permanent ban on unused turf grass in the city, which is estimated to reduce water consumption there by 15% annually (Metz & Ritter, 2021). Also in that year, California issued a Proclamation of a State of Emergency to bolster drought response programs across most of the state. And in 2023, some Arizona residents went nearly two months without tap water as their supply had been cut off under state drought regulations (Dominguez, 2023).
Managing a Crisis
The future of droughts in the Southwest and the security of the Colorado River remain in question. In 2022, an expansive team of researchers published a comprehensive suite of studies seeking to better understand the current megadrought and its consequences. One of these studies characterized the region’s future as “deeply uncertain,” a term that accounts for a lack of consensus on both priorities in resolving the crisis and assumptions of potential natural conditions (Smith et al., 2022). In essence, the researchers warned of difficulties in successfully tackling the megadrought so long as the involved parties disagree on how to do so. They expressed the complexity inherent in predicting the future of the region in the face of so many variable factors, from precipitation levels to local water use; projections of both the supply and demand of Colorado River water are difficult to estimate and far from consistent.
Smith et al. (2022) argued that the best way to approach the megadrought in the long term is through specialized frameworks (referred to as “Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty”) that emphasize the extreme variability involved in the crisis and focus on the practicalities of potential solutions. This means recognizing the vast web of variables (both human and non-human) that impact the ecological situation of the Southwest and designing solutions with them in mind. No single plan can recover the Colorado River outright, but a comprehensive system of plans that focus on specific issues may find success.
In the short term, at least, some progress has recently been made in that regard. In March 2024, the federal government announced that the Colorado River Basin states and Mexico had agreed to conserve at least three million acre-feet of water from the Colorado River through 2026, including about 400,000 acre-feet from Lake Mead alone. Moreover, it has allocated billions of dollars to federal agencies like Reclamation to establish water-security infrastructure in the Southwest (US Department of the Interior, 2024). These projects are significant steps in addressing the megadrought, but they must be sustained and expanded upon in the long term to successfully manage the social and environmental crises at hand. Any measures taken must consider the forty million people who depend on the Colorado River for their basic needs of water and electrical power, the five million acres of farmland that rely on it for irrigation, and the local, state, national, and tribal governments that hold jurisdiction over it (US Department of the Interior, 2024). Addressing the megadrought will unavoidably require those parties to limit agricultural and urban development and draw less water from the Colorado River than would be preferred. These sacrifices will be difficult ones, but they are imperative to have any chance of preserving the economy, ecology, and society of the American Southwest.
Ryan Tenner is a sophomore at the University of Florida majoring in History and Political Science and pursuing minors in Economics and Environmental Justice & Policy. His fascination with the Colorado River megadrought arose after visiting Lake Powell, where the stark discoloration of the canyon walls indicated just how severely the water's surface height has declined. Aside from the American Southwest, he is also interested in studying native landscaping practices and suburbanization in South Florida. He enjoys gardening, weight training, 19th-century adventure novels, and the fantastic discographies of Elton John and Jimmy Buffett.
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