Six Companies

Six Companies, Inc. was the contracting firm that was formed to build Hoover Dam and later went on to build Grand Coulee Dam and other large projects. It was a consortium formed by six smaller general contractors in order to submit a bid for the Hoover Dam contract. Because of the immense size of the dam, no single contractor had the resources to make a qualified bid alone. Six Companies was composed of:

1. Morrison Knudsen of Boise, Idaho,
2. Utah Construction of Ogden, Utah,
3. Pacific Bridge Company of Portland, Oregon,
4. Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco, California,
5. Kaiser of Oakland, California, and
6. MacDonald-Kahn of Los Angeles, California

The dam was completed two years early, after a bid of $48,890,955.

Reference

• Big Dams and Other Dreams: The Six Companies Story (1996), by Donald E. Wolf