Boulder City Hoover Dam Museum at Boulder Dam Hotel

The Boulder City/Hoover Dam Museum tells the story of the men and women who braved the desolation of the southern Nevada desert to build Hoover Dam and settle Boulder City. Their's is a story of American ambition, vision and grit. Built during the Great Depression and as the Dust Bowl ravaged the American heartland, the engineering and construction marvel that is Hoover Dam also served as a beacon of hope — signaling a brighter future. Boulder City / Hoover Dam Museum's three-dimensional, interactive displays and exhibits describe the great social and economic forces surrounding the 1929 Stock Market Crash and Depression that drove thousands of unemployed citizens from their homes into the isolation of the Nevada desert where the Boulder Canyon Project was one of the few places in the United States where men could find work. Photographs, artifacts, oral histories, and the sounds of Hoover Dam construction ringing off the walls of Black Canyon provide a sense of the complexity, danger, and immense scale of the construction project, as well as a picture of ordinary life in an extraordinary time and place. Listen as these pioneers tell about their lives in Boulder City and down at the Hoover Dam construction site in the desperate years of the early 1930s. Mothers describe how they set up households in the sandy wastes along the Colorado River. Dam workmen tell stories of the dangers they faced building Hoover Dam, an engineering project unlike any attempted before. How did they live? How did these people survive 120-degree heat in the summer and below-freezing temperatures in the winter? How did they care for their children? How did they get back and forth to work? How much money did they earn in Boulder City, a town completely controlled by the federal government? What did their homes look like? What happened if workmen were injured or killed on the job?