History of the National Park Service and multi purpose river basin development programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority which began in the 1930s and spread to river valleys in all parts of the country after World War II. Lake Mead was the first National Recreation Area. The Boulder Canyon Project Act, passed in 1928, authorized the Bureau of Reclamation to construct Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. Work began in 1931 and the dam, highest in the Western Hemisphere, was completed in 1935. The next year, under provisions of an agreement with the Bureau of Reclamation, the National Park Service assumed responsibility for all recreational activities
Steamboats of the Colorado River California, about 40 miles north of Goffs station, on the Santa Fé Railway. A mining camp, Vanderbilt was established nearby Vanderbilt Spring. The discovery of additional gold-rich veins in the fall of 1892 set off a rush to the area. A few months later gold was found at what became the placer mining camp of Murphyville, on the Arizona side of the river just twelve miles below Eldorado Canyon. Also in 1892, another gold boom occurred twenty miles east of Eldorado Canyon at White Hills in the White Hills, in Arizona Territory. Gold mines were revived in the Picacho District