and skills to implement them in realistic ways. Another biographer, Edward Allan Sullivan, described him as having "the courage of ignorance." He committed extensive resources into developing tourism infrastructure on Mount Desert Island in Penobscot Bay in the Gulf of Maine, which by the 1880s was becoming a wealthy tourist enclave. This consisted of a large hotel along with a mountainside cog railway, both of which opened in 1883 but proved to be financial failures. Before the end of the decade, Clergue had moved on to even greater peaks of ambition when at the suggestion of Maine politician James G. Blaine, he sought to compete with British and Russian interests in Persia. With the decline of Qajar Iran amidst the Great Game between these twin imperial powers, western financial and development interests began to encroach on the country. Clergue made a bid for the long-term monopoly on banking, water utilities, and railways in Iran, but failed and had to return home in defeat. Similarly, a scheme to draw British investment to shipbuilding in Mobile, Alabama, was also a failure. As a businessman, Clergue's most notably developed concept was of industrial integration, a principle which he continually returned to and emphasized; he described it as "the principle of correlation". Clergue believed that a cluster of related enterprises could achieve economies of scale if integrated successfully. His charisma and vision proved influential with politicians and financiers who, at the peak of the Gilded Age, were willing to invest in ambitious projects. By the 1890s, Clergue was backed by significant Philadelphia and New York investment interests. Arrival at Sault Ste. Marie Canada was a logical investment choice for American finance capital, and Clergue soon arrived there to scout for opportunities. Clergue initially planned to travel to Fort William, which commanded a strong position at the head of Lake Superior, to investigate the possibility of hydroelectric development. Along the way, he took an interest in Sault Ste. Marie, which had water and rail transport connections, but had been bypassed by the Canadian Pacific Railway's transcontinental mainline a decade earlier, and whose economy had stagnated with the decline of the fur trade. Local businessmen had attempted a hydropower scheme intending to capitalize on the rapids of the St. Marys River, but a construction disaster left the project unfinished, with a debt load of $263,000 hanging over it. Clergue, who had arrived in 1894, sensed an