Six Companies
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- Six companies can also refer to the Chinese Six Companies
Six Companies, Inc. was a joint venture of construction companies that was formed to build Hoover Dam and later went on to build Grand Coulee Dam and other large projects. It was a consortium formed by six smaller general contractors in order to submit a bid for the Hoover Dam contract. Because of the immense size of the dam, no single contractor had the resources to make a qualified bid alone. Harry W. Morrison of Morrison Knudsen (Washington Group International) formed the joint venture and was elected president of it. Frank Crowe, an employee of Morrison Knudsen was the General Superintendent. Six Companies started working in about June 1931. Six Companies was composed of:
- Morrison-Knudsen of Boise, Idaho 10%,
- Utah Construction Company of Ogden, Utah 20%,
- Pacific Bridge Company of Portland, Oregon 10%,
- Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco, California, and Henry J. Kaiser of Oakland, California, (Bechtel-Kaiser) 30%, and
- MacDonald and Kahn of Los Angeles, California 20%, and
- J.F. Shea of Portland, Oregon 10%
The dam was completed two years early, after a bid of $48,890,955 ($711,604,200.81 inflation adjusted). The project was so complex and large in scope that only 3 bids were received. Six Companies bid was $5,000,000 lower than the next highest bidder, a bid spread of almost 10%.
[edit] Railroad
The Six Companies also had a 19.1 mile railroad of the same name. It connected to the U.S. Government Railroad (Hoover Dam) along the Hemeway Wash at Lawler, Nevada at a location also known as "U.S. Government Junction". From Lawler the railroad went north for 7 miles to Saddle Island and then east to a gravel plant (Three-Way Junction) that is now submerged under Lake Mead. From the gravel plant the line split into two branches. One branch ran south for 4.8 miles to Hoover Dam via Cape Horn, Lomix (Low Level Concrete Mixing Plant) and Himix (High Level Concrete Mixing Plant) and the dam face. The other branch is now also submerged under Lake Mead and ran north for 7.3 miles across the Las Vegas Wash, crossed the Colorado River across a bridge into Arizona to the Arizona gravel pit (Arizona Gravel Deposits) at a location 2 miles from Callville.
The line was constructed by railroad contractor John Phillips of San Francisco, California. The dam was dedicated in September 1935 and the Six Companies, Inc. railroad line is now submerged beneath hundreds of feet of water.
The U.S. Government Railroad had a 10-mile branch that brought supplies by rail from a connection with the Union Pacific Railroad's Boulder City Branch at Boulder City, Nevada.
[edit] References
- Myrick, David F. (1992). Railroads of Nevada and Eastern California Volume 2: The Southern Roads. Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 734-752. ISBN 0-87417-194-6.
- Wolf, Donald E. (1996). Big Dams and Other Dreams: The Six Companies Story. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0-8061-2853-4.
