Hoover Dam & Dam Building Craze

"Although the first hydroelectric power station began operation on the Fox River near Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1882, it was the Boulder Dam (later renamed the Hoover Dam), built in the 1930s, that ushered in the twentieth-century's large-scale dam-building craze. Under the aegis of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal government set out with missionary zeal to make high plains and deserts bloom. In his landmark study Rivers of Empire (1985), American environmental historical Donald Worster has argued that the Hoover Dam and similar large-scale impoundments were essential to the demographic and economic growth of the arid U.S. West."