In the depths of the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover appointed an obscure Utah attorney and Democratic legislator to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), the powerful institution the Republican administration launched in February 1932 to deal with the nation’s deepening financial crisis. As a respected western stockman, lawyer, banker, and businessman, Judge Wilson McCarthy was well qualified for the position, but after his name was presented to the corporation’s other directors, one asked, “Who the hell is he?” Eighteen months later, when McCarthy resigned to return to private practice, everyone of importance in the American government knew the answer. “Upon...

The American saga of Utah’s McCarthy family began when blight struck the fields of Ireland. Black rot destroyed the island’s potato crop in 1845. Over the next five years, famine killed a million Irish men, women, and children and drove almost another million to seek a home across the Atlantic Ocean. Among those who fled starvation aboard the “coffin ships” that transported Irish emigrants to America were Cornelius McCarty, his wife, Johanna, and their two small children.¹

Cornelius McCarty was born in Cork, Ireland, in either 1818 or 1819. About three years later, Johanna Driscol (or O’Driscol) was born nearby...

The Rocky Mountains have never been an easy place to make a living, especially for farmers and ranchers dependent on the weather, but it has always been, as Wallace Stegner said, the native home of hope. Rising to the challenge of wrestling a living from unforgiving land in Utah’s difficult and fickle climate inspired some men and women to dream dreams a reasonable person might not conceive—and then undertake even more daunting ventures. Long odds seldom deterred Charles McCarthy or his equally enterprising wives from taking on difficult tasks, even in the face of past failures. But McCarthy’s ambitions...

One of the unintended consequences of the federal campaign against polygamy was the extension of Mormon Country south into Mexico and north to Canada. Even though polygamy was illegal in both countries, hundreds of Mormon colonists fled to Chihuahua in 1885, and within ten years, more than three thousand Latter-day Saints had settled in ten colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora. Seeking another refuge, in 1886, LDS President John Taylor instructed Cache Stake President Charles Ora Card, who was preparing to flee to Mexico, to go instead to Canada. As a young man, Taylor had immigrated to Canada from England, and...

Charles McCarthy’s sons came of age on the Canadian prairie, but both boys completed their high-school education in Utah. Young Charles, his sister Marjorie recalled, “wanted business,” and so went on to train at the high school associated with the Latter-day Saints University, now LDS Business College. Wilson followed him and graduated in 1902, but his first love remained ranching. Before they completed their educations, however, both made the rite of passage for young Mormon men known as a mission. Charles was the first missionary called from the new town of Raymond. “Wilson stayed with the cattle,” Marjorie remembered. After...

As America’s economic nightmare darkened, in early June 1932, the president of the United States called together the seven directors of the powerful new federal agency he and Congress had created to deal with the crisis. The leaders of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation met at the president’s private retreat, Camp Rapidan, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, but it is unlikely they had time to enjoy the remote spot’s excellent trout fishing in Hemlock Run: they had gathered to deal with the deepening national disaster the president blamed on “our rotten banking system and pressures from abroad.”³⁵²

The men at...

Dennis McCarthy’s busy father greeted him in New York when the young man returned from serving in the LDS Church’s British Mission in August 1933. He joined Wilson in Washington for several days at the Shoreham Hotel. Minerva and the rest of the family had already decamped to their new home in Piedmont, California, while Wilson wrapped up his duties at the RFC. In early October, McCarthy “yielded to the tug of the west” and was on his way to California, where he spoke to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club on the sixth.⁴⁸⁶

McCarthy’s address, which was broadcast, outlined his twenty...

As Wilson McCarthy was wrapping up his work on the Denver & Salt Lake Railway in November 1935, Federal Judge J. Foster Symes made McCarthy an offer that was too good to refuse: the chance to save one of the West’s great railroads from ruination. His service with the D&SL had won him the respect of the most powerful men in Colorado, and they realized they needed a man of McCarthy’s caliber to help save one of the economic foundations of the region. The Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad Company—the name assigned the corporation when Eastern financiers restructured the company...

During 1934, the Denver & Rio Grande Western faced one financial crisis after another—and there were no solutions in sight. Any talk of sales, mergers, or consolidations had ceased, proclaimed Arthur Curtiss James, the single largest stockholder of the Great Northern, the Northern Pacific, the Southern Pacific, and the Western Pacific—and, some said, the owner of more railway stock than anyone else in the world. “Who wants to buy a railroad with costs increasing and dividends going down?” he asked the Denver Post. “The railroad situation is still on the river of doubts,” James concluded grimly.⁶⁰³

As 1935 drew...

Historians have long debated when the Great Depression began and ended—and why. All but the most hidebound ideologues agree that the beginning of the war in Europe in September 1939 led to the revival of the American economy. Business was more than reborn: over the next six years, it boomed as the nation became what Franklin D. Roosevelt dubbed “The Great Arsenal of Democracy” in a fireside chat at the end of 1940. Newly reelected to an unprecedented third term, FDR said that the whole purpose of his recent actions had been “to keep you now, and your children...

“Way out West, Colorado, mountain state of the union, is the hub of a lofty region, residents of which proudly talk about the Rocky Mountain Empire,” observed a romantic celebration typical of its time in 1951. Shortchanging half the region’s population, it asserted, “The story of this vast domain is the story of its men.”⁷²⁴ A photograph taken in the late 1940s of one such man shows Wilson McCarthy, still trim in his mid-sixties but looking somewhat weary, seated at his paper-strewn desk, his hands folded before him and a cuspidor gleaming on the windowsill behind him. Except for his...

The Americans who led their nation through the Great Depression and World War II did not view their country’s prospects in 1945 through rose-colored glasses. Like many of them, Wilson McCarthy cast a wary eye on the future. Most economic forecasters expected the traditional economic downturn that had always accompanied peace: almost no one anticipated the astonishing boom that followed the war as ambitious veterans eagerly competed for brides, cars, housing, jobs, and education. The United States had established itself as the richest and most powerful nation on earth, and now its economic system was about to produce a level...

The name Wilson McCarthy appeared “frequently in connection with divers projects of imperial proportions,” the Columbia Law School News observed in 1951, and it was typical of the praise that his associates and acquaintances heaped upon the judge as he entered his seventh decade. He seemed more comfortable when the eulogies celebrated his railroad and its achievements. Its once-demoralized employees, who now numbered more than six thousand, bragged “about the line and its management. Shippers and travelers, not only in Colorado and Utah, but throughout the nation, talk about the Rio Grande as one of America’s friendliest and most progressive...

In December 1968, the Rocky Mountain News interviewed Harry Swan at the restaurant at Denver’s Stapleton Airport, a dozen years after the death of the co-trustee with whom he had engineered the redemption of the D&RGW. Swan casually mentioned that if he and Wilson McCarthy had gotten their way, “some of the big jets outside would be wearing the Rio Grande emblem.” As World War II was winding down, both men recognized that airlines would be unbeatable competitors for their passengers. “Since the Rio Grande was offering a transportation service, they reasoned, why not expand it to include a network...