The great need of connecting the rich Lake Superior region with the other lakes,--urged upon the people for twenty years,--brought about in 1855 the building of the “Soo” Canal. After much discussion Congress voted in 1852 three-quarters of a million acres of land to aid the state of Michigan in building this canal. This was done in spite of the opposition of many Eastern members to spending so much money on a project for so remote a wilderness. The type and size of the canal was fought over by engineers and statesmen, and it was finally agreed that a lock two hundred and fifty feet long would provide amply for any vessels that would ever navigate those waters. A young man who was visiting at Sault Ste. Marie at the time, Mr. Charles T. Harvey, became convinced that this was too small an estimate. Mr. Harvey was neither an engineer nor a canal builder, but was a man with foresight. He went before the legislature with plans, drawn under his direction by a New York engineer, for a lock at least one hundred feet longer, and was met with ridicule. The longest vessel on the lakes was then only one hundred and sixty-seven feet, and the lock proposed by Harvey and the Fairbanks Company, who were backing him, would be the largest lock in the world. Harvey won his point, and was given charge of constructing the canal. It was a tremendous undertaking for those days. The nearest railroad was many hundred miles away; the steamboats were slow; it took six weeks to get a reply to a letter mailed to New York, and agents had to be sent to that city to get gangs of laborers from the immigrant population. The temperature on the Sault was at thirty-five degrees below zero much of the time during the winter months, and the men were necessarily poorly housed and cared for. At one time an epidemic of cholera killed ten per cent of the men, but work went on each day. Again two thousand laborers struck, and Harvey hid all the provisions in the woods until they returned to work, which they did in twenty-four hours. Within two years, and at a cost of less than a million dollars, the canal was completed. Immediately the problems of lake navigation were entirely changed. One of the difficulties of the cautious Mr. Collins of seventy years before, who wanted the size of boats limited to fifteen tons, was removed in the building of a channel around the rapids of the Sault. In fifteen years the lock was enlarged and then later enlarged again, till in 1896 the famous eight-hundred-foot Poe lock was built by the army engineer of that name, at the cost of four million dollars. Mr. Harvey, at the fiftieth anniversary of the building of his first lock, came to the celebration of the event and heard discussion of the possible need of a lock larger than the present one. Thus in the memory of living men there has been built up a great commercial marine of over five thousand vessels, and by the spending of fifty millions of dollars in deepening all the lake channels and