Written by JOHN S. ADAMS/Tribune Capitol Bureau
HELENA — The descendents of the man known as the “father of modern elk management” have demanded that the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation remove Olaus J. Murie’s name from a conservation award given each year to professionals who demonstrate “tremendous accomplishments in wildlife research and conservation.”
Olaus Murie’s youngest son, Donald, on July 11 wrote a letter to Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation president and CEO David Allen demanding that the organization stop using the Murie name due to group’s “all-out war against wolves.”
Allen said the group would honor the request and no longer call the award the Olaus J. Murie award.
“We are going to accommodate the request because we are not going to change our position on wolf management,” Allen said Wednesday.
Olaus J. Murie was a famed naturalist, author, and wildlife biologist who conducted groundbreaking field work on many large North American mammals, including elk and caribou in the early part of the 20th century. He and his wife, Margaret, were a driving force behind the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and as a founding board member of the Wilderness Society, Olaus Murie fought a proposal in the 1940s to construct the Glacier View Dam, which would have flooded more than 10,000 acres of Glacier National Park.
Murie is perhaps best known as the original author of the seminal 1951 text “The Elk of North America.”