Six Companies, Inc. was a joint venture of construction companies that was formed to build the Hoover Dam across the Colorado River in Nevada and Arizona.
They later went on to build the Parker Dam, a portion of the Grand Coulee Dam, the Colorado River Aqueduct across the Mojave and Colorado Deserts to urban Southern California, and other large projects.
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On January 10, 1931, the Bureau of Reclamation made the bid documents available to interested parties, at five dollars a copy. The government would provide the materials; but the contractor was to prepare the site and build the dam. The dam was described in minute detail, covering 100 pages of text and 76 drawings. A $2 million bid bond was to accompany each bid; the winner would have to post a $5 million performance bond. The contractor would have seven years to build the dam, or penalties would ensue.[1]
A consortium was formed by six smaller general contractors in order to submit a bid for the Hoover Dam construction contract. Because of the immense size of the first dam on the Colorado River, no single contractor had the resources to make a qualified bid alone. Harry W. Morrison of Morrison-Knudsen (Washington Group International, a division of URS Corporation) formed the joint venture and was elected president of it. He selected FrancisFrank Crowe, an employee of Morrison-Knudsen as the General Superintendent. Crowe was the true project manager of the undertaking; he drafted the bid, costed the projected, won the project selection process, and hired each of the men who were employed during the course of the project. The Six Companies started working in about June 1931.[2]
Six Companies Inc. was composed of:
The Six Companies Inc. won the contract in 1931, after a bid of US$48,890,955 (US$711,604,200.81 inflation adjusted). The project was so complex and large in scope that only 3 bids were received. The Six Companies Inc. bid was $5,000,000 lower than the next bidder, meaning a bid-spread of almost 10%.[3] The Six Companies completed construction of "Boulder Dam—Hoover Dam" two years ahead of schedule in 1935, although It took nine years (1938–47) under relative secrecy, to fix serious leaks with a supplemental grout curtain.[4]
The Six Companies also built the 19.1 mile Six Companies Railroad. It connected along the Hemeway Wash, present day Las Vegas Bay, to the U.S. Government Hoover Dam Railroad at Lawler, Nevada, 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 the Three-Way Junction gravel plant, 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 (the Low Level Concrete Mixing Plant) and Himix (the 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 on a bridge into Arizona and 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 Western Pacific Railroad purchased several of the Six Companies dump cars for company service after the dam was completed and the equipment declared surplus. One of these cars is now preserved at the Western Pacific Railroad Museum at Portola, California.
The U.S. Government Railroad had a 10-mile branch that brought supplies by rail from a connection with the Boulder City Branch of the Union Pacific Railroad at Boulder City, Nevada.
During World War II, The Six Companies also held a majority ownership interest in Joshua Hendy Iron Works in Sunnyvale, California. Hendy was most known for its record breaking assembly line production of 754 two story tall Liberty Ship EC-2 Reciprocating Steam Engines, producing one engine every 40.8 hours. They were used at the Richmond Shipyards building the Liberty Ships[5][6]