pecially production that requires the co-ordination of
river, rail and maritime facilities. The Canal means millions of new
money to New Orleans, as its proponents said it would.

On March 12, the authorization of the Capital Issues Committee was
given. On March 15, the George W. Goethals Company, Inc., was retained
as consulting engineers on the big job. The services of this company
were secured as much for its engineering skill, proven by its work on
the Panama Canal, as for the prestige of its name. The Goethals
Company, co-operating with the engineers of the Dock Board, which did
the work, designed the famous lock and directed the entire job. George
M. Wells, vice-president of the firm, was put in active charge of the
work. General Goethals made occasional visits of supervision.

The dirt began to fly on June 6, 1918.

Before coming to New Orleans to take up his work, Mr. Wells, acting
upon instructions of the Dock Board, called at the office of the
Foundation Company in New York, whose engineer had already studied the
possibilities of establishing a shipyard on the canal, and guaranteed
an outlet to the sea by the time its vessels should be finished.

The river end of the site chosen for the canal consisted of low and
flat meadow land. There were a few houses helter-skeltered about, like
blocks in a nursery, but the principal signs of human life were the
cows that grazed where the grazing was good, and sought refuge from the
noonday beams of the sun under the occasional oaks that had strayed out
into the open and didn't know how to get back. The middle of the
site--several miles in extent--was a gray cypress swamp, with five or
six hundred trees to the acre, and always awash. The lake end was
"trembling prairie" marsh land subject to tidal overflow and very soft.

[Illustration: N. O. ARMY SUPPLY BASE]

[Illustration: BUILDING LAKE ENTRANCE]

With dredges, spades, mechanical excavators, piledrivers and dynamite
the work opened.

A great force of men began to throw up by hand, the levees that were to
serve as banks for the turning basin, the lock and other portions of
the canal. This levee would keep the liquid material, dredged out, from
running back into the excavation. The turning basin, 950 feet by 1,150
feet, was an expansion of the original industrial basin. Situated
several hundred feet from the lock, its purpose is to enable ships
entering the canal from the river, and passing through the lock, to
t