My first choice for a headline for this article was “The Scoundrel Who Bankrupted a Legislature” but upon reflection, I think the legislature had it coming. So I changed “scoundrel” to a more neutral term. The name “William Sharon” meant nothing to me until I recently read Irving Stone’s 1956 masterpiece, Men to Match My Mountains: The Opening of the Far West, 1840-1900. The book has been appropriately lauded as “an unforgettable pageant of giants”—men who scaled the Rockies, made deserts bloom, dug deep for gold and silver and surveyed territories west of the Mississippi into 22 states in...