Six Companies, Inc.

Six Companies, Inc. was a joint venture of construction companies that was formed to build the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in Nevada and Arizona.

They later built Parker Dam, a portion of the Grand Coulee Dam, the Colorado River Aqueduct across the Mojave and Colorado Deserts to urban Southern California, and other large projects.

On January 10th, 1931, the Bureau of Reclamation made the bid documents available to interested parties, at five dollars a copy. The government would provide the materials, and the contractor was to prepare the site and build the dam. The dam was described in minute detail, covering 100 pages of text and 76 drawings. A $2 million bid bond was to accompany each bid. The winner would have to post a $5 million performance bond. The contractor would have seven years to build the dam, or penalties would ensue.

A consortium was formed by eight smaller general contractors in order to submit a bid for the Hoover Dam construction contract. (They chose to call themselves Six Companies, Inc. as an allusion to Chinese Six Companies, where Chinese tongs in California took their grievances.) Because of the immense size of the first dam on the Colorado River, no single contractor had the resources to make a qualified bid alone. Harry W. Morrison of Morrison-Knudsen (Washington Group International, a division of URS Corporation) formed the joint venture and was elected president of it. He selected Frank Crowe, an employee of Morrison-Knudsen as the General Superintendent. Crowe was the true project manager of the undertaking. He drafted the bid, costed the project, won the project selection process, and hired each of the men who were employed during the course of the project. The Six Companies started working in about June 1931.

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