Copyright University of Nevada Oral History Program 2002
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| John F. Cahlan There are a thousand and six
stories that have been told about the construction
of Boulder Dam, some of them true, and most
of ‘em false. It is a fact that there
were a great many heat deaths in the canyon
during the first summer down there. That was
for two reasons. One was because of the heat,
and the second was that the people working in
the canyons had been on one or less meals per
day for quite some time. And when they got down
there and saw the Anderson Commissary there,
with all this food stacked up to eat, they just
couldn’t believe it. They just gorged
themselves and then went down in the canyon,
and the heat’d hit ‘em, and they’d
keel over. The government, at that time, when
all the deaths were occurring, asked Harvard
University to send out some scientists to see
what could be done to combat the heat. And they
came up with the salt tablets to help prevent
dehydration. And every employee at the dam working
in the canyon and those that weren’t,
too, I guess, were required to have salt tablets
in their possession at all times, and to take
about one an hour. And it was determined that
this did a great deal towards combating the
heat prostration, although, once the people
got used to eating regularly and not quite as
much as they did when they first came there,
it was all right. |
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