INTRODUCTION by Thomas G. Alexander [* A MOMENT OF INSIGHT, the noted Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called entrepreneurs “creative destroyers.” That designation seems especially appropriate for officers of Utah International, whose principal business consisted of altering the land through such earth-gouging projects as grading railroad beds, building high dams, and stripping coal and iron. Employees of the company took landscapes—many virtually unmarred by previous human activity—and transformed them into built environments from which they supplied goods and services to customers throughout the world. In this book, Gene Sessions and Sterling Sessions recount the story of Utah International’s entrepreneurs and managers. Above all, this is the story of how two entrepreneurs, Edmund Wattis Littlefield and Marriner Stoddard Eccles, transformed the company incorporated in 1900 by Wattis brothers Edmund Orson, William Henry, and Warren Lafayette into the largest and most profitable mining company in the United States. The brothers founded the company to excavate and grade railroad beds, but by the 1970s, the company had abandoned the construction business entirely. Since this book chronicles the work of entrepreneurs, with few exceptions it does not detail the daily life of the laborers who sweated over the picks, shovels, and scrapers of the early years or piloted the drag lines, dump trucks, and cement buckets of more recent times. The construction workers and miners will XV