A Dam in the Desert: Pat Moran's Last Water Venture

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 50, 1982, No. 1

A Dam in the Desert: Pat Moran's Last Water Venture

BY WILLIAM L. MORAN

I CAN'T UNDERSTAND HOW HE BUILT IT." Bill Heyenbruch of the U.S. Corps of Engineers was looking at a picture of Bishop Creek Dam above Metropolis, Nevada. His office in Sacramento was to have been my last stop on a long search for an answer to the same question. "Even today with the latest technology the task would be staggering," he decided. "In 1911 it was something of a miracle." He noted that it was listed in the 1973 World Register of Large Dams:

The rock, earth, and concrete dam rises 130 feet above bedrock, stretches 416 feet across a canyon, is 150 feet thick at the base and 16.5 feet thick at the top. The reservoir behind it has a capacity of 35,000 acre-feet of water, the equivalent of 10 billion gallons.

Patrick J. Moran was known best in Utah as P. J. Moran, builder of pipelines, buildings, and heating plants and paver of streets and sidewalks. In building the Bishop Creek Dam in the Snake Mountains of northeastern Nevada he was venturing 200 miles from his home base in Salt Lake City.

Had I been older in 1911 I might have seen it happen instead of having to burrow in the history archives and engineering offices of three states to learn about it seventy years later. Each discovery generated more questions and each answer made the search more intriguing.

Pat destroyed all of his papers when he closed his business in 1924. Had I not been his son, the authentic story of the building of Bishop Creek Dam might never have been uncovered. But once the link between the dam and its builder and the ghost town of Metropolis was found, my latent curiosity about history and human ingenuity impelled me to take the search to its finish.

During the last year of my inquiries I learned that the U.S. government was interested from another point of view. They wanted to find out if the structure could possibly be brought back into use after seventy years of neglect. They did not know who had built it.

When Moran won the contract to build the dam and reservoir for the Pacific Reclamation Company he was forty-seven years old. Since emigrating from Yorkshire, England, at age fourteen he had worked with steam and water conduits and reservoirs and ultimately had formed a large contracting company for paving and for erecting buildings. 4 His passion for big things probably sprang from a deprived youth when he had to quit school in the fourth grade to work in the coal mines and brickyards as a child laborer. Small boys doing men's work in tight places acquire a passion for bigger and better things.

Finally, fed up with this grimy labor and feeling that his widowed but newly remarried mother could manage, he slipped unnoticed onto a steamship at Liverpool. When the liner was far out to sea he asked the skipper if he could work his way to Baltimore. This bit of resourcefulness got him to America on a luxury liner doing kitchen work for food and keeping warm at night stoking the steam boilers below.

When fully grown, still short but solid and energetic, he continued striving to be big and to do big things. He served as an apprentice to a steamfitter in the eastern United States, took night classes, became a journeyman and then an expert builder and general contractor within twenty years of the voyage. Eventually, he employed hundreds of workmen and utilized just about every type of machine then invented for moving earth and rock.

In 1887 Pat Moran learned that Utah had no proficient plumbing and heating contractor so he traveled to Salt Lake City and found all the work he desired installing plumbing, heating plants, and water systems.

He recognized ability in others and associated with those who did well, particularly those who made it on their own in rough country. Although he observed the success of those who pinned their faith on mining and real estate investments, he preferred to develop his skill in the direct management and wise use of manpower. When the Southern Pacific Railway bridged the Great Salt Lake with the Lucin Cutoff to save mileage, it was Moran's pipeline that helped supply the 483,000 gallons of fresh water used daily by the men and the steam engines far out in the lake.

Moran's greatest good fortune came in the discovery of Frank Gawan who also had an Irish background and had emigrated from England as a child. They met at the turn of the century when Frank was city engineer for Salt Lake City and only in his twenties. Pat admired his ability and Frank was so eager to learn the secrets of the older man's success that he left his responsible city job and signed on as a laborer. Moran gave him a good mix of freedom and responsibility, and he soon learned every angle of contracting. He quickly advanced to general superintendent and helped the company become preeminent in the paving and water projects of the valley of the Great Salt Lake.

By 1906 Moran had won the contract for the Big Cottonwood conduit which delivered most of Salt Lake City's water supply. By 1909 he and another builder had put up a huge power structure and woodstave pipeline in Weber Canyon to furnish electricity for the streetcars of Salt Lake City and the electric engines of the Bingham copper mines.

The pipe was big enough at its entrance for a man on horseback to enter. Gawan had helped with these projects. The two men had become a complementary team, planning and estimating jobs together and securing the most lucrative contracts in the area through low bidding and quick completion. Frank concentrated, on the engineering challenges while Moran managed the promotion of contracts and financial matters.

In 1910 the Pacific Reclamation Company, a private concern, obtained some desert land in Nevada from the federal government and

planned to build an agricultural colony there. 6 Sixty-three miles northeast of Elko, it was to be the biggest city, the promoters said, between Denver and San Francisco and was to have farm land watered by what was to be the largest reservoir in the Intermountain country. This called for the highest expenditure made to date, private or public, for any structure in Nevada excepting the transcontinental railroad. The proposed cost of the dam, $200,000, in that year would be the equivalent of about six million dollars in the 1980s.

Moran and Gawan, with a contingent of engineers and other members of Pat's company from Salt Lake, spent three months surveying and testing the soil of the Bishop Creek area near the headwaters of the Humboldt River at an elevation of 6,000 feet. The reclamation company's engineers had already done this, but Moran, like the doctor who insists on his own evaluation, did it over and planned for a deeper bedrock foundation to support the heavy structure.

His men drilled 300-foot wells for water and located possible rock quarries and gravel deposits nearby. Moran had learned lessons in the importance of foundations from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Then, Moran went east to learn what he could about the Pacific Reclamation Company and the men behind it. The fact that the Southern Pacific Railroad was interested in the model city added to his optimism.

On his return he had no trouble winning the contract in competition with several large western construction companies. With the experience of having constructed water systems in Utah since 1901 he knew what it took to place the right value on labor, materials, transportation, and the financing that went into a bid. He also knew the tricks that water plays when made to follow a manmade course. He knew what devastation badly timed storms in the mountains can bring. And he knew the tricks men play in their frantic game of climbing to the top in business and government.

Moran and the leaders of the Southern Pacific Railroad were together taking a risk on Metropolis. Each party looking at what the other was risking seemed to inspire a mutual confidence in the joint venture.

The promoters of the land project, though gambling on barren desert land, showed vision that seemed to extend past the profit motive. They reached out to people who seemed ready for change -— Canadians looking toward the states, Utah Mormons whose pioneering spirit needed a new lift, and Jewish immigrants from Europe who were not being absorbed readily in the shops of New York City. Mormon church leaders in Utah, always open to the colonization idea, approved the project without officially investing in it.

For those with limited capital, the company offered dry farms for $15.00 an acre and for those with more, irrigated plats for $75.00 an acre, a high price for those days. Much of the cost of building Metropolis was negotiated through the transfer of shares in the project. Moran's costs for the dam, however, were handled differently.

In New York the leader of a national farmer's organization, when told of the enterprise, said that the city workers of 1912 could make a better transition from urban to rural life than earlier ones who thought a bearing fruit tree would grow the year after a seed was planted and that even crackers might be induced to grow from cracker seed.

When Moran and Gawan sat down on the slopes of Emigration Canyon in northeastern Nevada to assess the job of dam building in the spring of 1911 there was no Metropolis, no camp, no rail spur, no eager pool of native laborers or work animals, no food supply, saloon, telephone, lodgings, or electricity. There was nothing but a wild canyon lined with rocky ledges, a flat expanse further down covered with sage, and a visionary map of a transformed piece of desert. They knew what it would take to blast the rock and change the site into a reservoir with 35,000 acre-feet of water, and they believed what the promoters said about the water that was available in Bishop Creek and nearby creeks. They had to take the reclamation company's word, however, that an annual fourteen-inch precipitation would continue and that no one would dispute the water rights when storage was provided. They moved ahead on the wave of an unquenchable Irish optimism.

The dam was not as large as some of Moran's earlier projects, but geography called for the steps required by the largest and costliest dams. Roughly, after estimating, bidding, and bonding, the preliminary construction stages called for:

1. Arranging long-distance rail facilities for transport of men, horses, machines, and materials to the rail terminal at Wells, Nevada.

2. Building roads and bridges to the site; erecting a tent city with mess hall and office quarters and a construction camp with horse stalls, a blacksmith shop, and storage quarters.

3. Transporting everything needed from the terminal at Wells to the site by teams of horses.

4. Excavating with horse-pulled scrapers, dynamite, trench diggers, a steam shovel and derricks, and making space for stockpiling dirt and rubble.

5. Drilling for water, installing pumps and pipelines, locating sand and gravel deposits, rock quarries, and dump sites.

6. Installing a narrow gauge railway for dump cars and piping in well water for drinking purposes and for washing rocks, sand, gravel, and work animals.

Since the contract called for a finished reservoir within ten months of the signing date, they prepared for a race against time. Winter created a natural deadline. Temperatures of twenty degrees below zero were known in the territory, making winter construction work unthinkable.

It had not been easy in the beginning to get the train operators to give them enough time to unload their cumbersome survey outfit at the Wells, Nevada, station. The official schedule listed 3:00 P.M. as the arrival and departure time, about enough time to jump while the engine took on a gulp of water. Fortunately, after some negotiation, Moran could ask for just about any concession from the railroad and have it granted. Those higher up eventually passed the word down that this was the same Moran who had helped bring the line across the Great Salt Lake nine years before. For the big haul he contracted for a sequence of freight trains and a siding at Wells for cars stretching a halfmile from engine to caboose, with permission to stop as long as necessary. The unloading of one trench digger took the better part of a day. The unloading of a dismantled steam shovel took the better part of two.

To reach the reservoir site from the loading dock they had to cut more than twelve miles of roadway through rugged terrain and across four creeks. Most of it had to accommodate two-lane traffic and provide a surface hard enough to support the weight of digging rigs, boilers, derricks, and building materials that challenged even the steel rails of the Southern Pacific. In good weather, rain, ice, or snow the roads had to withstand as well the hooves of fifteen-hundred-pound Belgians and other work horses and mules in teams of eight pulling on the grades.

Sufficient men, horsepower, and materials could not be obtained in Nevada where most men and horses were needed at the mines and ranches. And about the only heavy building materials available locally had to be extracted from freshly dug gravel pits, from rock quarries, and from surplus rock and dirt left over from the excavation work. Not even Fresno scrapers could be bought or leased in eastern Nevada. Nor was it possible to get feed for the animals or adequate provisions for the workers without an extensive search. The land at the camp grew nothing but sage, cedar, and a little greasewood.

One story passed down from that time is that some of the fill for the dam consisted of broken brick left over from the San Francisco earthquake. Dead-end runs from the coast made rail freight cheap enough to justify the trip, and the city fathers of San Francisco were glad to get rid of the estimated 6.5 billion broken bricks that took three years and the lives of thousands of horses to clear and pile.

Loads of heavy lumber for the building and the shoring of concrete, heavy steel gates for the reservoir, and the dismantled digging machines were dragged up the hill in a continuous stream of creaking wagons. When steep inclines and bad weather interfered with traction, some of the most cumbersome loads were pulled up on skids attached to steamfed donkey engines with long cables.

The freight loads traveling from Moran's construction yards at Salt Lake City in June 1911 presented a confusing sight to orderly minded train watchers. At Ogden, where the first sections connected with the main line, no one had seen such an armada since the Southern Pacific constructed the cutoff across the Great Salt Lake in 1903. The first flat cars contained cook stoves, tents, lumber, narrow gauge dump cars, trackage, anvils, axes, shovels, and sacks and barrels of provisions. Later cars contained more scrapers, picks, donkey engines, clam shell scoops, and huge cement mixers. A dismantled steam-powered trench digger rode on one car and two 70-foot masts and booms lashed together took up space extending across two flat cars. The last few cars contained barrels of explosives, cables, spare wheels, a steam tractor, and one maroon-colored Packard runabout half-buried in baggage.

Coaches were filled with workmen. Cattle cars carried horses, mules, and a sprinkling of drivers who insisted on being with their animals. A car or two of lions or elephants, had they brought up the rear, would not have presented too much of an additional surprise to onlookers who knew Moran and his flair for drama. As it was, the activity of these special trains as they arrived at Wells probably furnished the equivalent of a year's excitement for the entire population of 598 souls. They must have wondered if they were about to be occupied by either a circus or a regiment.

The trainloads became more conventional as the dam work progressed. They bulged with masonry rubble, coal, crushed rock, sand, cement, lumber, steel rods, and pipe. They kept coming until the thick concrete foundation with its reinforced steel was in place and supporting the hundreds of tons of materials climbing upward from the bedrock of the canyon.

In keeping with his idea of abundant supply lines on all jobs through the years, Pat had acquired controlling interest in the Portland Cement Company of Utah, the Federal Coal Company, the Empire Brick Company, gravel pits, a rock asphalt quarry, and three asphalt processing plants. He even owned half-interest in Keith O'Brien's department store which, however, catered to women of fashion rather than to cement finishers in need of bib overalls.

The massive movement of equipment, men, and materials from Salt Lake City to Wells could not have been accomplished without the transcontinental railroad with its coal-fired engines. The last 12 miles, more strenuous, slower, and more costly than the first 189, could not have been covered without horses, wagons, and the special roads built for the one purpose of supplying the dam.

In the fall the encampment five miles above Metropolis showed more life than the budding city itself. It became a community of its own with more of a connection with the railroad town of Wells than the town it was to provide with water. Pat opened an office at the Metropolis Hotel when tjhat was ready. However, it seemed that the biggest diversion for Metropolis residents came from sightseeing trips to the dam site. The camp store contained a supply of the best imported whiskey, no doubt hauled up the hill on the sturdiest wagons with trusted Irishmen holding the reins. How much liquid other than water eventually flowed to Metropolis from Bishop Creek is not known.

Many miles of roadways were built to provide access to quarries, sand pits, and water installations on all sides of the site. Narrow tracks were laid along the rim of the canyon and throughout the diggings. The stubby four-wheeled cars propelled by men pushing and horses pulling were loaded by cranes at the excavation areas to carry dirt and rocks to a point where they could be used in the body of the dam. Later, when the foundation was in place, the cars ran on their narrowgauge tracks over a sort of bridge parallel to the top surface where they released their loads.

Moran had carefully studied the operations of the open-pit copper mine at Bingham, Utah, where such dump cars removed ore. There, tracks were relaid along each tier of excavated terrain as the operation progressed. He used the same principle at Bishop Creek on a much smaller scale but in reverse — building up a mountain instead of cutting it down.

Before laying down a base for the dam, the men and machines dug down 35 feet and then drilled and blasted 4 feet into bedrock across the entire width of the canyon. Tons of concrete, fresh from the mixers, were poured onto a forest of steel bars.

Moran's men found that putting up a dam in the canyon wilderness was not like laying sidewalk in Salt Lake City. The engineering crew had underestimated the depth of the mud deposits formed from the foundation work and the number of mules needed to help scoop it out. But the mules and the muleskinners, who drove the animals all day and washed them off in the evening, took the mud in stride as did the men who, in mining circles, were called muckers. Moran had made a trip to Kansas City to purchase two cars of Missouri mules bred for heavy work of this type. This increased the horse and mule population to over 100 before winter. But they, too, brought problems. They required not only muleskinners capable of handling them but separate quarters where they could not bite the horses or anyone else. They also required blacksmiths with the courage and ability to grab and hold a restless hoof for shodding. The chief qualification of a muleskinner seemed to be toughness equal to that of the animal and disregard for what Josh Billings rated one of the worst fates that could possibly befall a man, "to be mangled by a mule."

Although many machines were brought into service at times, the dam went up principally by the sweat of men and their animals. Luckily, motor trucks had not fully replaced teams. The transition from hay eaters to gasoline eaters was slow for two reasons in that day. Moran and his men were strongly attached to the animals, and the trucks of 1911 were questionable hill climbers. Road travel would have made it a 286-mile trip. Bishop Creek became, in a sense, the last frontier for those horses and mules. It was their day and in that rough terrain even the steam engine could not outperform them. It is even possible that one of Moran's reasons for taking the contract was to demonstrate, to his own and to his men's satisfaction, what they could do in this rugged spot.

Even some lowly sheep gave service. Herds on loan from Nevada flockmasters were driven back and forth over the earth to compact the Sloping surfaces when weather prevented the use of specialized earthtamping rollers.

The steam shovel proved very costly for the scooping of the foundation trench. It was needed on other jobs in the city but was brought in and out in the beginning to handle the heaviest digging. Its steel jaws could lift a ton of rock with each thrust following a blasting operation. The costly aspect was dismantling and reassembling the heavy metal boom, wheels, gears, and steam boiler, and allocating eight men to keep it moving around the project. An attempt was made when its mission was complete to run it back down the hill to the Wells depot without taking it apart first. At the first bridge crossing this was found to be a mistake. The wooden bridge caved in under its 30-ton hulk, and it had to be dismantled for the rest of the trip down. They had failed to remember the shovel's history. In Salt Lake it held up traffic for half a day when it stalled trying to cross a rise at a trolley track intersection.

The road construction work could have been cut in half had Southern Pacific built its spur line to Metropolis earlier, but no rails were installed until the winter of 1911. Road work increased costs but, more important, prolonged the project because of flash floods and washouts between the town of Wells and the dam site. Even after the spur appeared, its terminal at Metropolis was inconveniently placed southwest of the camp with two large creeks to hamper the building of another heavy-duty private road.

In the fall a shortage of cement workers occurred just as the 80- foot steel and concrete gate tower was being built upstream of the main structure. Throngs of men were needed for day and night shifts in a desperate race against winter cold. Frozen ground could not be moved. Icy cold concrete could not be properly poured or set. The deadline was getting near.

Moran brought in extra acetylene lamps, stepped up night shifts and improved the stock in the saloon tent. Also he raised wages and advertised throughout the Intermountain states for more men.

It was rumored that word had spread among wives and sweethearts of prospective workers back home that not far from the tent city two separate sightings more dangerous than storms were reported. One was a genuine gray wolf identical to one.that killed a dozen bucks in a herd of sheep. The other, more dangerous still, was a pair of attractive camp followers.

But the reality of the worker shortage was tied to the fact that Moran had several construction projects back in Utah that required many workers and much heavy equipment at critical periods. Given a choice, what worker would opt for canyon tent living in the winter rather than his brick home and a family fireplace to sit by each night.

By late October of 1911 some 300 men were on the job, but weather prevented significant progress. Snow fell on the quarry gang brought in to cut and install rock for embedding in concrete on the upstream side of the dam. Many of the men and animals were made idle as icy winds whipped down Antelope Peak and the 11,000-foot Ruby Mountains.

Then, a major setback occurred. Frank Gawan, suffering from a gall bladder ailment, had to return to Salt Lake City for treatment. Moran had by this time given him full responsibility at Bishop Creek while he himself resumed overall management of the company. A substitute chief engineer had to be hired temporarily to fill in for Frank. But the work continued to bog down. Errors crept in and morale dropped to a low point. Gawan returned after a few weeks to oversee the wall building and hoped to get the major concrete work under way. But within another month he became ill again and was escorted down the canyon by team to the train to head for home. Soon he underwent major surgery in Salt Lake City, and within a few days succumbed to pneumonia, dying on February 15, 1912. Frank Gawan failed to see the dam completed. The gates were closed for a test two days after he died. The newspapers in Salt Lake City gave Frank high tribute as Pat Moran's number one general superintendent and praised him for his performance on the last great water project of his career.

Gawan's death left Moran with the entire burden that had piled up at Bishop Creek. The deadline for completion of the dam was not met. However, since the building of Metropolis and its complex of irrigation channels was also held up by storms and other events, Moran was given more time, but the ultimate deadline was winter. Winter cold had already delayed significant progress on the dam to the point where major concrete work had to be held over until spring. Most of the men had to return to Salt Lake City, but some worked through the heaviest part of the winter repairing the roadbeds and bridges, caring for the animals, and repairing the machinery.

To construct Bishop Creek Dam, 75,000 cubic yards of earth were chopped away from the canyon banks and 20,000 cubic yards of mud dredged from the riverbed to make way for the foundation. Then, more than 250,000 cubic yards of earth fill, masonry rubble, and reinforced concrete gave the barrier shape and strength. The dam was projected to store enough water for most of the 40,000 acres of alfalfa, wheat, and potatoes envisioned for Metropolis.

The dam was finally completed on April 12, 1912. The gates were lowered and water successfully backed up for two miles. The city of Metropolis celebrated the event and the Metropolis Chronicle carried headlines on Moran and his achievement.

Had Pat been less involved in the problems created by the illness of Frank Gawan and the complications in the building task, he might not have been so surprised and defeated by another event. He would have investigated rumors circulating in the area that the waters of Bishop Creek were in danger. Farmers and ranchers further down the Humboldt had read about the Owens Valley water having been taken over by Los Angeles some years earlier and were not about to let it happen to them. Before the dam was completed and filled, the Pacific Reclamation Company's rights to the water of Bishop Creek and other headwaters of the Humboldt River were challenged in the courts of Lovelock, Nevada, and an injunction was placed on the use of the water and the dam. This would not have been Pat's problem had he been paid all along, but up to that point the company had apparently paid little and late.

The promising city of Metropolis had by this time covered its landscape with schools, a bank, parks, a railroad station, and a $100,000 hotel, plus graded streets, paved walks, gutters, and a sewage system. It had drawn a population of nearly a thousand hopeful farmers and traders from Utah, Colorado, Idaho, New York, and Canada. It had filled its newspaper and other Nevada papers with periodic progress reports on Moran and others. Pat had even bid on building a bank.

Even after the citizens down the Humboldt had won their suit and had reduced the storage of water to less than one-fourth of the company's estimate, the reclamation company continued its efforts to sell tracts and to praise the dry farming possibilities of the area. But early in 1913 the company was forced into receivership. By that time the main officers had resigned and left the endangered project to return home.

This series of events following the blow of Frank Gawan's death tested Moran's strength to the limit. He received only a few payments for his effort and very little recognition outside of Nevada. The reclamation company that hired him lost its investment in Metropolis, its business status, and its water. It was so preoccupied with the failure that it probably did little more than offer him its regrets and a half-hearted promise of future compensation. The only financial record located showed them owing him an overdue sum of $83,000 plus interest in August 1912.

There was no fanfare forthcoming from Salt Lake City for Moran's engineering feat other than an item or two in the Salt Lake Tribune indicating that it was the largest reservoir of its kind in the country. 22 The passage of men, animals, and machinery back to the home base in Utah's capital city had none of the glamor of a circus parade because of what had happened to their loved boss, Frank Gawan, and what had happened to the water of Bishop Creek. The dreary lines of workers that strung along through Metropolis to meet the trains at the new station looked more like a funeral procession. None of the enthusiasm of a homecoming or of a victorious army of dam builders showed on the men's faces.

Moran became a casualty of the Pacific Reclamation Company failure, but settlers were hit the hardest in terms of sacrifices. They left everything behind in the states they came from, brought their families, and put their toil and last dimes into their property. Then, they lost it all as surely as if the dam had given way and flooded them off the land.

Pat Moran must have found some quiet comfort in his achievement. It brought together many of the symbols of his past — sheep and horses that meant so much to his Irish father, coal that dominated his childhood in the mines, steam boilers that gave him his passage to America on the ship, bricks like those he cut on one of his earliest jobs, and Emigration, the name of the mountain pass that cradled Bishop Creek. So whether or not Pat made these connections consciously, the dam contained all that for him as it rose from the riverbed.

Since Metropolis is not alive to use the water, the dam might be called a monument to Pat Moran, Frank Gawan, the workers, and the unfortunate settlers who lost their resources there, and perhaps to Metropolis, a ghost town in the West that came into being through the promise of wheat and potato crops rather than gold or silver.

For full citations and images please view this article on a desktop.