In 1904, Chicago wheat experts spread the word that black rust was ruining the wheat crop of the western Canadian prairies: that the Canadian grain harvest would yield only 35 million bushels. E. Cora Hind disagreed, made her own inspection, and maintained that Canadian yield would be 55 million. This was considered a joke until 54 million were harvested. Cora Hind of the Winnipeg Free Press was on her way to establishing herself as the legendary wheat expert of western Canada.
 

E. Cora Hind had the uncanny ability to predict with great accuracy the annual prairie wheat crop yield, in turn becoming the darling of North American grain speculators. But she also was at the forefront of the women’s movement. She became not only the first western female journalist but also became president of the Canadian Women’s Press Club where she agitated for women’s universal suffrage and rights. [Photo, courtesy Provincial Archives of Manitoba/N978]

In fact her predictions were so accurate over the next 29 years that world markets depended on them. In 1905, for instance, she estimated 85 million bushels and was less than half a million out; two years later, on an estimate of 71,259,000 bushels, she was out 337,000; and, in 1909, when her estimate was 188,109,000, the official yield was 188,119,000. In 1913, when her estimate was short of what farmers expected and she was dubbed “Calamity Cora,” her response was short and to the point: “The west was big enough and strong enough to have the truth told about it on all occasions.”

E. Cora Hind was born in Toronto in 1861 to a stone mason father whose carvings are an integral part of Toronto’s Osgoode Hall and Montreal’s St. James Cathedral. She was brought up by her aunt Alice after her mother died when Cora was only two, and, when her father died three years later, Cora, with Alice, moved to her grandfather’s farm in Flesherton, Ontario. She attended school there and in Orillia before graduating from high school. Alice then decided to move to Winnipeg, Cora going with her with thoughts of becoming a journalist.

The editor of the Free Press, however, made it clear he would not have a woman on staff. When she discovered that no one in Winnipeg knew how to use a typewriter, she rented a machine and, after 30 days of two-finger training, was hired by a law firm to become, according to K.M. Haig in a brief biography of Cora in Brave Harvest (1945), the “first typist west of the Great Lakes.”

In 1893, Cora opened her own secretarial service and among her first customers was a group of dairymen who asked her to record their meeting. She did and also sent a report to the Free Press. Other agricultural organizations hired her and, in 1898, she made her first wheat crop analysis for Colonel J.B. Maclean of Maclean Publications in Toronto. Heavy rains that fall had caused rumours that the crop would be ruined and Maclean, who had met her on a previous trip, asked her to make an assessment. Her report, after she had travelled as far as Moose Jaw and back, declared that, although 35,000 acres had been frozen, there was still a good yield.

In 1901, her wish to work at the Free Press was realized when its new editor, John W. Dafoe, impressed by her numerous reports and obvious knowledge of agriculture, hired her. Over the next 37 years she won worldwide acclaim not just for her knowledge of wheat but also for her forthright writing and support of dairy farming, beef cattle, sheep breeding and everything else dealing with agriculture.

On a trip to England in 1922, for instance, she campaigned through press interviews, speeches, and meetings with dealers, government officials, and anyone else who would listen for the lifting of an embargo against Canadian cattle that had been imposed in 1892 when one cow was found suffering from a contagious disease. That fall, the ban was lifted. A decade later when she arrived in Britain on the first ship to carry grain from Churchill, Manitoba, the London Morning Post on that occasion wrote, “A woman who can go around and look at wheat fields, and then come home and estimate the Canadian wheat crop, forecasting it so accurately that bankers and grain companies take her estimates as gospel — such a woman is not met with every day.”

Cora didn’t just survey the wheat fields from train windows and buggy rides in the country but — even into her seventies — made a point of climbing through or over fences to scoop up a head grain and thresh it in her hand to assess its quality. She also developed a wide network of railwaymen and farmers to keep her apprised about local weather conditions and she kept in touch with experts at the experimental farms before making her prediction each year until the Canadian Wheat Board took over the marketing of grain in 1933.

In 1935, Cora was honoured by the University of Manitoba with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. In June she embarked on a two-year trip to 27 countries around the world, sending back hundreds of thousands of words to her paper touching on not only agricultural matters but also the social conditions, historical background, scenic beauties, and outstanding personalities she met. When she returned in July 1937, she edited her correspondence into a book, Seeing For Myself (1937), and was a popular and outspoken speaker at numerous agricultural gatherings, for, as W.A. McLeod of the Western Producer once wrote, “She was more positive about everything than most people are about anything.”

Mel James