sentences:  While various 19th-century canal projects had minor success in extending navigation across the shoals, the Tennessee River Gorge remained largely untamed.In 1898, several Chattanooga business interests formed the Tennessee River Improvement Association to lobby for efforts to extend year-round navigation to Chattanooga, and around 1900, Major Dan C. Kingman of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers drafted a design for a dam that would flood the Tennessee River Gorge and remove the swift current and various hazards that had long prevented large-scale navigation through this stretch of the river.In 1904, Kingman's friend, Josephus Conn Guild, offered to build the dam with private funding in exchange for the rights to the dam's hydroelectric power.