Sweethearts Of The West: HONEYMOON ON A DOGSLED?

By Caroline Clemmons

Women's History Month Honors Mardy Murie.

Grandmother of

the Conservation

Movement

Margaret (Mardy) Murie is fondly called the Grandmother of the Conservation Movement, but her love of the land began at a young age. Margaret Thomas grew up in Fairbanks after arriving by sternwheeler with her family as a small child. Her stepfather, Louis Gillette, was an assistant U.S. attorney in Fairbanks.

She met Olaus Murie, a biologist, in Fairbanks. In 1924, Mandy was the first woman to graduate from the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines, now the University of Alaska. She and Olaus married in 1924 in a 3 a.m. sunrise ceremony at Anvik on the Yukon River. Doesn’t that sound romantic? It does to me, but there’s a more practical explanation. After her graduation, Mandy traveled by steamwheeler to the village where she and Olaus had agreed to meet. Olaus had been studying birds in Hooper Bay. The couple left on a 550 mile honeymoon on dogsled and riverboat to study caribou migration.

Mardy and Olaus Murie

Another expedition a few years later involved boating from Fairbanks hundreds of miles to the Old Crow River in Canada to band geese. She continued to accompany her husband on his journeys even while nursing their three children.

The couple left Alaska in 1927, but returned to visit many times in the following decades. Mardy's adventures growing up in Alaska and as a scientist's wife are chronicled in her book, "Two in the Far North," and in a documentary, "Arctic Dance." Published in 1962 and still in print, the book describes the winter night when she was 14 and Fairbanks caught fire. The men burned the town's bacon supply as fuel to keep the steam-powered water pump running. She also recounts her late-winter dogsled trips over thawing rivers, how she became the first woman to graduate from the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines, her marriage to Olaus, the couple's honeymoon, as well as a later river journey taken with their infant son, Martin, strapped to their boat. She also authored "Island Between," published in 1977, and "Wapiti Wilderness," published in 1966 with her husband as co-author, even though he had died three years earlier.

Olaus and Mardy

I love the adoring way she

looks at her husband.

In 1927, the Muries moved to Jackson, Wyoming, where Olaus studied ecology, specifically the elk population. Mardy worked side-by-side with Olaus in the field, studying elk, sheep and numerous other animals in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. They would camp for weeks at a time in the wild, open valley of Jackson Hole. Olaus' primary goal was to identify pressures on the elk population, causing the startling decrease in the area. Over the course of nearly 40 years, The couple had numerous backcountry expeditions tracking the wildlife in the area. The couple even took expeditions when their three children were still nursing!

In 1945, they bought a former dude ranch after Mardy decided she no longer wanted to live in town. She wanted to walk out her back door and into the woods. The Murie Ranch became a hub for conversations and problem solving to protect the wild. Olaus and Mardy took on work as director and secretary of the Wilderness Society, helping draft recommendations for legislation and policy like the protection of Jackson Hole National Monument.

In 1956, Mardy, Olaus and other field biologists traveled to the upper Sheenjek River on the south slope of the Brooks Range, inside what is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That trip began the campaign to protect the area as a wildlife refuge. The couple recruited former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas to help persuade President Eisenhower to set aside 8 million acres as the Arctic National Wildlife Range, which was expanded to 19 million acres and renamed in 1980.

Mardy and Olaus

The idea of preserving an entire ecological system became the intellectual and scientific foundation for the creation of a new generation of large natural parks, especially those established by the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act. By the time of his death on October 21, 1963, Olaus had earned a prominent position in the historical ranks of eminent American preservationists. Although he did not live to see the Wilderness Act passed, its enactment was in part attributable to his work and convictions. Mardy, however, attended the signing of the Act, by President Lyndon Johnson, in the Rose Garden of the White House on September 3, 1964.

After her husband 's death in 1963, Mardy began writing and took over much of her husband's conservation work, writing letters and articles, traveling to hearings, and making speeches. Mardy returned to Alaska to survey potential wilderness areas for the National Park Service and worked on the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act that was signed by President Carter in 1980. That legislation set aside 104,000,000 acres of land in Alaska and doubled the size of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In addition to Alaska, Mardy traveled to Tanzania and New Zealand studying wild areas, assessing areas for wilderness qualities and working to protect nature from exploitation.^]

The Murie Residence in Moose, Wyoming was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. As part of the Murie Ranch Historic District Landmark in 2006, it now houses a conservation institute name for Mardy and Olaus.

During her life, Mandy Murie received numerous honors and awards. She died peacefully at home at age 101.