Colorado Water
I'm trying to catch up on the news. Here's Carl Hoffman's obituary from the Rocky Mountain News [Decemver 29, 2004, "Carl Hoffman designed major dams of the West"]. Hoffman worked for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, designing dams and spillways. He started with 'em in 1932, just before the New Deal broke.
He worked on Hoover (Colorado River) and Grand Coulee (Columbia River). Two of the biggest concrete dams of the era.
Ivan Doig describes the building of the Fort Peck Dam in his book Bucking the Sun. It's a great read for the comparison of the engineering between the types of structures.
Hoover is a concrete arch-gravity type, in which the water load is carried by both gravity action and horizontal arch action. Grand Coulee is a Gravity dam which means a dam constructed of concrete and/or masonry which relies on its weight and internal strength for stability. Gravity dams are generally used where the foundation is rock and earthfill in proper quality and quantity is not available.
Here's the lowdown on the Fort Peck Dam: It was built using hydraulic methods; meaning that the embankment materials were carried and placed at the damsite in flowing waters. Still the largest hydraulic earth filled dam in the world, the dam contains Missouri River bottom sands, silts, and clays dredged by electrically operated dredge boats and then pumped through twenty-eight inch pipelines to the damsite. After completion of the dam the resulting reservoir, Fort Peck Reservoir, covered the majority of the Missouri River dredge sites. On June 24, 1937, the Corps diverted the Missouri River through the four flood control tunnels. They completed the dam three years later, in 1940.
6:12:42 PM 
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