James Gaius Watt was born in Lusk, Wyoming, and raised in nearby Wheatland, a town one of his critics described as "a place frozen in amber decades ago—the 1890s plus electricity and TV." As President Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior, Watt was heavily criticized for his position on conservation. He remains an icon of what environmentalists oppose. His memory was recalled during George W. Bush's administration, when his former staffer, Gale Norton, became Secretary of the Interior.

Watt came to the U.S. Department of the Interior from a position as founding president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF) in Denver, a conservative group that acted on the behalf of oil, timber, development, and mineral corporations. Started with money from Joseph Coors, of Coors Brewery, the...