On the 18th of March, 1911, Theodore Roosevelt stood in a canyon in the Arizona desert, roughly 76 miles northeast of Phoenix, and looked up at the largest masonry dam the world had ever seen. He had left the presidency two years earlier, and now he had ridden out along a rough mountain road to dedicate the great wall of stone that carried his name. Rising about 280 feet from the bed of the Salt River and stretching 723 feet from wall to wall, the dam had been built from roughly 344,000 cubic yards of rough-cut stone. Roosevelt pressed a button, releasing the first measured flow of water through the works, then turned to the crowd of about a thousand people who had gathered in the dust and sun.
“If there could be any monument which would appeal to any man,” he told them, “surely this is it. ”
He could not have told them the half of it. He could not have named the twenty-six Italian stonecutters who had carved the face of the dam by hand, nor counted the Apache men who had cut the very road that carried him to the canyon. He did not speak of the men who drowned when the river rose, or of the whole town that had to be built in the desert before a single stone could be laid.
This is the story of how a nation reached into one of the emptiest corners of the continent and built something that would still be holding back a river more than a century later. To understand why men would haul stone into a canyon far out in the desert, you have to understand the Salt River. It came down out of the high country of central Arizona, and it was a liar and a killer. In a wet year, it swelled into a brown torrent that ripped out canal headings, drowned fields, and swept away everything the farmers of the Salt River Valley had built.
In a dry year, it shrank to a trickle and then to cracked mud. The land itself was rich, some of the finest soil in the West, but the water that could make it bloom would not hold still long enough to be trusted. Long before the first American settler drove a stake, an ancient people called the Hohokam had dug hundreds of miles of canals across that same ground, farmed it for centuries, and then vanished. When settlers came in the 1800s and dug their own ditches, some of them followed the very beds the Hohokam had cut a thousand years before.
They named their new town Phoenix, for the bird of legend that rises from the ashes of what came before. But a city that rises can also fall, and by the 1890s the people of Phoenix knew that without some way to store the water of the Salt River, to hold the wet years back and dole them out through the dry ones, their Phoenix might follow the Hohokam into the dust. The answer came from Washington. In 1902, Congress passed the Reclamation Act, also called the Newlands Act, one of the great turning points in the history of the American West.
The idea was simple and enormous. The arid lands of the West could never be settled by private effort alone, because no single farmer or company could ever afford to dam a river. So the federal government would do it: build the great storage dams, sell the water to the settlers, and let the payments flow back over the years to build still more dams. The man who pushed hardest for this vision was the president himself, Theodore Roosevelt.
He saw in the dry West not a wasteland, but an unfinished country, and he meant to finish it. Roosevelt Dam was among the very first projects authorized under the new law. It was approved in 1903, only months after the act was signed, and it became the first major project completed under the entire federal reclamation program. If it worked, it would prove that the government could do what no rancher and no company ever could.
If it failed, it would discredit the entire idea before it had a chance to spread. And that canyon was about as hard a place to build anything as the West could offer. The dam site sat where the Salt River met Tonto Creek in rough, broken country near the Superstition Mountains. In 1903, there was no road to the site, barely a trail.
Before anyone could haul a single sack of cement, someone had to build a way in. So the first great work of the Roosevelt Dam was not the dam at all. It was a road. They cut it 64 miles through the mountains, blasting shelves out of cliff faces and switching back and forth down grades that would frighten a modern driver.
The men who did the bulk of that brutal labor were Apache. Apache Indians, working for wages in their own country, built the road that made the dam possible. It was finished in December of 1904, and they called it the Apache Trail. By the time the dam was done, the government had spent nearly half a million dollars building more than a hundred miles of roads into that empty country, just to reach the place.
Reaching the site was only the beginning. A dam of that size needed cement, and there was no plant and no railroad within reach. So they built one. In the wilderness, beside the river, the government raised its own cement mill, using material from the surrounding hills.
They opened quarries in the canyon walls, strung power lines, and built a sawmill. Around all of this grew a town, with houses and a store and a school and offices, set down in a place that a few years before had held nothing but rock and cactus and the river. They called it Roosevelt. The Theodore Roosevelt Dam was a cyclopean masonry dam, built not of poured concrete but of enormous, rough, irregular blocks of sandstone and limestone quarried from the canyon nearby, each block set in mortar, the whole rising in a great curved wall against the river.
When it was finished, it was the largest masonry dam in the world and among the tallest dams of any kind. The first problem was weight. The blocks were far too heavy for any team of horses to drag into place. The engineers solved it with cable.
They strung two great cableways across the canyon from tower to tower, each one about 1,200 feet long, spanning the whole gorge in the open air. A block would be cut at the quarry, hooked to the cableway, carried out over open air high above the river, and lowered slowly into the exact place where the masons wanted it. Those two cableways were the beating heart of the construction. Without them, the dam could not have been built.
And yet for all their power, the cables only carried the stone. They did not cut it, and they did not lay it. To give the dam its face, the great outer surface of dressed stone, the project needed men who could take a rough block of limestone and cut it true. That skill was not to be found in the Arizona desert, so they sent for it.
Twenty-six Italian stonecutters were brought all the way from Pittsburgh to carve the limestone blocks that would form the face of the dam. On the job, they were known simply as the rock men. They were immigrants who had likely learned their trade in the old country, where cutting stone by hand was a craft handed down over generations. They were not alone.
There were masons from Scotland, from Germany, and from Switzerland, men out of the great stone building traditions of Europe. And around the skilled stone men worked a general labor force that was strikingly varied: European American workers and African American workers, Mexican American workers, Asian American workers, and American Indian workers. In an age of hard lines and harder prejudices, this dam in the desert was raised by about as broad a cross-section of humanity as the nation could assemble. They did not all speak the same language, but they laid the same stone.
The work was hard beyond easy imagination. There was no shade to speak of in an Arizona summer, when the heat in that canyon could climb past anything a man from Pittsburgh or Glasgow had ever felt. Men were injured. Men were killed, crushed or fallen or drowned, as men always were on the great works of that era.
They lived in the town of Roosevelt or in camps strung along the river, far from their families, and they worked for years to raise a wall that most of them would never see the use of. Remember too who was paying for all of this. Under the terms of the Reclamation program, the farmers of the Salt River Valley had bound themselves to repay the cost of the dam out of their own future harvests. They had pledged their land as security.
These were not wealthy men. They were homesteaders and small growers who had already lost crops to the river more times than they cared to count. If the dam failed, many of them would be ruined. And then there was the river itself, which had no intention of being tamed quietly.
In 1905, the Salt River reminded everyone what it was. Great floods came roaring down out of the mountains and tore through the works, ripping into the diggings and the temporary structures meant to hold the water back while the dam went up. The very thing they were building the dam to stop nearly wrecked the project before the wall was high enough to resist it. Work was set back badly.
Material was lost. But they did begin again, every single time, the crews going back down into the mud to clear the wreckage and start hauling stone once more. Year after year, the wall rose in spite of the river. Something else was happening at the dam that would prove nearly as important as the dam itself.
In 1906, Congress authorized the federal government to generate and sell hydroelectric power at the Salt River Project, one of the earliest ventures of its kind in the country. At first, that power served the construction itself, but the principle mattered far beyond the canyon. Power made by water at a federal dam could light homes and pump water and turn the wheels of industry. The idea that a great dam should be a powerhouse as well as a reservoir was written into American practice right here at Roosevelt, years before the more famous dams made it into legend.
Behind the rising wall, the water began to gather. As the dam closed off the canyon, the Salt River backed up into a great lake that spread out through the country upstream. This reservoir, called Roosevelt Lake, was for a time the largest artificial body of water made by human hands anywhere on Earth. That stored water was the whole point of the enterprise.
Every acre-foot held behind the dam was an acre-foot that would not flood the valley in a wet spring and would still be there to save a crop in a dry August. The construction ground on through floods and heat and the slow exacting labor of cutting and setting hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of stone. The final stone was laid on the 5th of February, 1911. The whole of it had cost about ten million dollars, an enormous sum for the time, paid for on the promise that the farmers of the valley would repay every cent out of the wealth the water would bring.
Now the dam stood finished, and the only thing left was to mark what had been done. That is why, on the 18th of March, 1911, Theodore Roosevelt came out to the canyon. He pressed the button, released the first flow of water through the dam, and spoke the words that are still bound up with the memory of the place. Here was a monument that did something.
It held back a river. It watered a valley. And used it was. With the flood tamed and the drought hedged against, the Salt River Valley became one of the most productive farming regions in the entire West.
Phoenix, which had been a dusty farm town of a few thousand people, began the long climb that would carry it toward becoming one of the largest cities in the United States. None of that growth would have been possible without a way to store and steady the water of the Salt. And the Roosevelt Dam did something even larger than water a single valley. It proved the whole idea.
Before Roosevelt Dam, the notion that the federal government could go out into the desert and build a great storage dam was only a theory. After Roosevelt Dam, it was a fact. The Reclamation program went on to reshape the entire American West. The greatest of the dams that followed, the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, would rise a generation later.
But Hoover Dam and all the rest stood upon a foundation laid at Roosevelt. And here the story takes a turn that most people who admire the dam do not know. The Theodore Roosevelt Dam that you would see today is not, on its surface, the dam that those Italian rock men carved and those cableways built. In the late 1980s, engineers took a hard look at the aging masonry giant.
The problem was not that the old dam was falling down. It had stood faithfully for three quarters of a century. The problem was what engineers call the largest possible flood and the danger of a major earthquake. Standards had changed a great deal since 1911.
Modern hydrologists calculated that a truly extreme flood could conceivably overwhelm the old dam, and modern seismologists worried about how the aging masonry would behave in a powerful earthquake. And this dam had a whole valley, and by then a great city, living downstream of it. So, between 1989 and 1996, the Bureau of Reclamation undertook one of the most remarkable pieces of work in the entire history of the dam. They did not tear the old dam down.
Instead, they raised it and they wrapped it. They built a new outer structure of modern concrete around and over the original masonry dam, encasing the old cyclopean wall inside a new and larger dam. They raised the height by about 77 feet, bringing the top of the dam to roughly 357 feet above the riverbed. The cost of that work was more than four hundred million dollars.
The original dam was not destroyed. The hand-cut stone that the twenty-six Italians shaped, the limestone and the sandstone that the cableways lowered into place, the wall that Theodore Roosevelt called a monument, all of it is still there. It was not demolished, it was entombed. The old masonry dam stands today exactly where it always stood, but it is now sealed inside the newer concrete, hidden from every eye at the very heart of the larger modern dam that surrounds it.
If you drive out to the Theodore Roosevelt Dam today and stand and look at it, you are not looking at the cyclopean stonework of 1911. You are looking at a smooth modern face of concrete poured in the 1990s. The beautiful rough stone, the visible proof of all that hand labor, is on the inside now, wrapped in concrete, and no visitor will ever lay eyes on it again. The rock men’s work did not fail.
It was not found wanting in strength for all the long years it served. It was simply overtaken by a stricter age that could not accept even a small chance of catastrophe, and so it was preserved by being buried. It is still there. It is still doing its work in the dark, inside the concrete.
In a strange way, that is the deepest kind of permanence a builder can have: to become the hidden core around which everything newer must be built. The Theodore Roosevelt Dam still stands, taller now than it ever was, holding back the same Salt River in the same remote canyon near the Superstition Mountains. Roosevelt Lake still spreads out behind it, still storing the water of the wet years against the coming of the dry. And that water still runs down to the Salt River Valley and still makes the modern city of Phoenix possible, exactly as it has for more than a hundred years.
And you can still get out there the old way. The Apache Trail, the 64-mile mountain road that the Apache cut through the wilderness before the dam could even begin, is still there, still winding through some of the most rugged and beautiful country in Arizona, still bearing the marks of the hands that made it. Of all the monuments in this story, that road may be the one that still shows its age most honestly. But when you reach the end of that road and stand at last before the dam, remember what you are seeing and what you are not.
The hand-cut cyclopean masonry of 1911, the work of the Italian rock men and the Scots and the Germans and the Swiss, the wall that the diverse thousands raised against the flood, is sealed inside the concrete now, out of sight for good. Know that it is in there. Know that it is still bearing its weight, and know that it was set there by men who deserve to be remembered far better than they are. The monument Theodore Roosevelt would praise was not really his.
It belonged to them: the Apache road builders and the Italian stonecutters, the African American and the Mexican American and the Asian American and the European American laborers, the men who drowned when the river rose in 1905, and the men who baked in the summer heat setting stone that no one would ever think to thank them for. They came from nearly every state and from all over the world, and they left behind a thing that still works, still stands, still gives life to a desert valley more than a century after the last of them laid down his tools. A hidden wall built by forgotten hands, still holding back the river it was raised to tame.
