Hoover Dam Hoover Dam Hoover Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Nevada and Arizona. It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its construction was the result of a massive effort involving thousands of workers, and cost over one hundred lives. Originally known as Boulder Dam from 1933, it was officially renamed Hoover Dam, for President Herbert Hoover, by a joint resolution of Congress in 1947. Since about 1900, the Black
Course of the Colorado River into the Salton Sink flooding farmland and creating the Salton Sea, which still exists today as the largest inland body of water in California. The river was finally diverted back to its present course in 1907. Geological evidence suggests that this has happened naturally many times in the past, filling Lake Cahuilla, with the floodwaters slowly evaporating over spans of decades before being re-flooded by the Colorado. The Colorado River meets the Mexico–United States border at the Northern International Boundary (NIB), where the Morelos Dam diverts nearly the entire remaining flow into the Reforma Canal and the Tijuana Aqueduct. Most