Hoover Dam Visitor Center & Tours

This guide to the Hoover Dam Visitor Center in Las Vegas opens with a 1921 survey crew scouting the canyon for a dam site, when a flash flood sweeps away a hard-rock miner named J. G. Tierney, whose body is never recovered. Fourteen years later the dam rises where his crew once worked, and his son Patrick, only twelve when his father drowned, grows up and moves his own young family here for work during the Great Depression, over his mother's fearful objections. Ninety-six men officially died building the dam, including high scalers who dangled from ropes on these canyon walls with only tar-coated hats for protection.