KVIG Informative

Federal engineers didn’t just build a dam in the Nevada desert in the early 1930s — they built and ran an entire town, with the legal authority to decide who could live inside its gates. That authority kept Black workers out of Boulder City entirely, funneling them instead into West Las Vegas, the neighborhood that anchored Southern Nevada’s civil rights organizing for decades afterward.

Congress authorized the dam in the Colorado River’s Black Canyon when President Calvin Coolidge signed the Boulder Canyon Project Act on Dec. 21, 1928, according to the Bureau of Reclamation’s official history of the project. The law took effect in June 1929, once the states sharing the river ratified the Colorado River Compact, which divided the river’s Lower Basin water among California, Arizona and Nevada — with Nevada receiving the smallest share of the three, 300,000 acre-feet a year, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.

The federal government awarded the dam’s construction contract to a consortium called Six Companies on March 11, 1931, for a bid of $48,890,995, the Bureau of Reclamation states. Six Companies organized a subsidiary, the Boulder City Company, that same April to build and run a town for the project’s workforce roughly six miles from the dam site, chosen for its higher elevation and milder climate.

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The gate the government controlled

Boulder City was not an ordinary construction camp. The Bureau of Reclamation put Sims R. Ely in charge as the town’s manager starting in April 1931, and the government town was built with paved streets, water and sewer systems, a city hall, schools and a 60-bed hospital, all built to house up to roughly 5,000 workers and officials, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.

The government drew a color line around who could live inside that town. Of the roughly 20,000 people employed on the dam project over its life, only 44 were Black, and none of them were permitted to live within Boulder City’s gates, according to a history published by the Las Vegas branch of the NAACP. Black workers were instead confined to makeshift camps in West Las Vegas, then a segregated area cut off from resources available elsewhere in the city, the branch’s history states. The exclusion helped spur the formation of the NAACP’s Las Vegas Branch #1111, organized under president Arthur McCants and co-founder Zimmie Turner alongside the Colored Citizens Labor and Protective Association under J.P. Liddell, according to the same history.

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The work itself was dangerous even for those allowed inside the gates. Nevada’s dam workforce peaked at 5,200 employees and averaged 3,500 over the course of construction, and 112 workers died in accidents or illness tied to the job, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. In the summer of 1933 alone, heat-related deaths on the project averaged one every two days.

Federal control over Boulder City lasted nearly three decades. The same government that decided who could live inside the town’s gates in 1931 didn’t begin handing it back to local control until Congress passed the Boulder City Act on Sept. 2, 1958 — Public Law 85-900 — and didn’t formally transfer the town’s land until a quitclaim deed took effect Jan. 4, 1960, according to the Nevada Legislature’s published city charter. That deed established the roughly 129,087-acre municipal land base, about 201 square miles, that Boulder City still governs today — 29 years after the government first decided who could and could not live inside it.