KVIG Informative

Before Boulder City had streets, a school or running water, the men and families building Hoover Dam lived in a tent camp on the canyon floor with no sewage, no electricity and summer heat that regularly topped 120 degrees. The settlement people called Ragtown left no formal death toll, no monument and barely a footprint. The federal heat-safety rules that govern outdoor construction workers today trace back to exactly this kind of unregulated exposure.

Word that the federal government was hiring to build a dam on the Colorado River reached Depression-era families up and down the river by 1931, and more than 5,000 men were eventually employed on the project, according to the National Park Service’s Lake Mead National Recreation Area history of the dam’s workers and families. Housing could not keep pace. Temporary settlements went up along the canyon wherever people could find flat ground, the Park Service’s history states, and daytime temperatures in Black Canyon could reach 120 degrees.

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One of those settlements, on the floor of Black Canyon itself, became known as Ragtown: a cluster of tents, cardboard structures and canvas lean-tos with no sewage or electricity, according to the Park Service’s history. Erma Ouida Godbey, born in Silverton, Colorado, on Sept. 25, 1905, arrived there in 1931 with her husband, Thomas Godbey, and their five young children after the family followed work along the Colorado River during the Depression, according to a National Park Service biographical article on Godbey. Thomas Godbey eventually found work building service roads for the dam’s contractors.

The Godbeys lived in two tents in Ragtown with daytime temperatures above 100 degrees, no electricity and scarce water, the Park Service account states. Erma Godbey hung blankets to shade her children and cooked over an open fire. According to the same Park Service article, three women in the camp died of heat exhaustion, and Godbey told her husband the family had to leave.

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The family bought land from the federal government near the dam site and became one of Boulder City’s founding families, according to the Park Service article. They built their house without formal blueprints, sketching floor plans by hand and using doors donated by a local church; Godbey later described the process as building it “by guess and by God,” the Park Service article states. She went on to fundraise and lobby for a school, hospital, community pool, library and cemetery in the new town, and led several of the civic institutions that followed.

A 1933 Fortune Magazine article on the dam’s construction, reprinted on the Bureau of Reclamation’s own history pages, recorded that more than 50 men had died building the dam by that point, attributing most fatalities to falling rock rather than heat. The article did not count deaths among the family members and dependents who lived in the unofficial camps outside the official workforce, including Ragtown. No comprehensive accounting of deaths in Ragtown itself appears in the federal record; what is documented comes from individual accounts such as Godbey’s.

The site where Ragtown stood no longer exists in any recoverable form. The riverbed where the Godbeys pitched their tents was submerged when the dam’s reservoir filled, and the area is now part of Lake Mead National Recreation Area, according to the Park Service article. Godbey died in 1997, having spent much of her life building the civic infrastructure that Ragtown never had.

The dam that drowned the ground where three women died of heat has no marker for them. The federal workplace heat-exposure rules written decades later exist because nobody wrote them in time for Ragtown.