JACKSON, Wyo. – Olaus Murie was born on March 1, 1889, and became a pioneer of conservation and wildlife preservation in Jackson Hole and North America.
Olaus Murie was a blue-eyed biologist studying wildlife in Alaska before he moved to Jackson Hole in 1927 to direct field studies of threatened elk herds for what became known as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). He published “The Elk of North America,” a standard text still referenced to this day, and advocated for an ecological balance of wildlife.
Together with his wife Mardy Murie and his half-brother Adolph Murie, who married Mardy’s half sister “Weezy,” Olaus established the Murie Ranch in 1945. The Murie Ranch became “the heart of the American wilderness,” as Olaus put it, and the headquarters for the Wilderness Society after Olaus was named its director.
Olaus and Mardy made their front porch a welcome place of debate and discussion, where Howard Zahniser famously penned the 1964 Wilderness Act a year after Olaus’ death.
“It takes a lot of energy and persistence to make something big like that happen,” says Hannah McLimans, lead faculty at the Murie Ranch with Teton Science Schools (TSS). She credits Olaus’ steadfast dedication to cultivating conversations about ecology and science as a foundational part of the Wilderness Society’s progress and the creation of the Wilderness Act.
“He was so devoted to science.”
Hannah McLimans
“It’s so clear that, at least for how the western world was thinking about science and ecology at that time, he was really at the forefront of thinking about things in a different way,” McLimans says. From his time in Alaska, Olaus learned about alternative ecological perspectives from native peoples and credited many of those ideas in his discussions and advocacy for wildlife.
According to Teton Science Schools, Olaus was awarded the Audubon Medal for his dedication to conservation in 1959, and upon his death in 1963 he was praised as “the one person who best personified wilderness in our culture.”
