The Grain Exchange observed two minutes' silence. Canadian public officials spoke and many a Western wheat farmer wrote his heartfelt tribute. "One of the greatest of Canadian women," said Prime Minister Mackenzie King. These words were the last homage to Ella Cora Hind, agricultural expert of the Winnipeg Free Press, who died last week at 81, still a working newspaperwoman.
Cora Hind was known wherever wheat is grown in the Western world. Her uncanny accuracy in estimating the yield of Canada's wheatland made her final figures gospel in the world's exchanges. Once (1909) she missed by only one-half of one percent on a 118,719,000-bu. crop. From 1904 until 1933 she failed only twice to make a guess: in 1912, which was too wet for even a rough estimate; in 1926, when she was too ill.
Those who saw Cora Hind on her tours through the wheat never forgot her. A sturdy, schoolmarmish spinster, she wore high leather boots, a cowgirl skirt, flat-crowned sombrero, and a beaded buckskin coat which hung to her knees. This getup was discarded in her later years in favor of ill-fitting riding breeches, shirt and high boots. She carried rubber hip boots in case of rain.
No one knows how Cora Hind arrived at her precise estimates, but one of her Free Press colleagues has described her method: She would "stop her car, march into a field, spin around three times with her eyes shut, and grab a stalk of wheat."
But Cora was more than the oracle of Canadian wheat. She saw bushels of wheat and all the produce of a farm in terms of food and clothing and education for the farmers' children, and she used her position to make Canadian agriculture better. On her annual tour she told farmers what to plant and where, and returned the next year to see that they had done it. In gratitude, they once gave her $1,300 in gold, another time a flock of sheep.
When she resigned as agricultural editor in 1937 to write only when it suited her, Free Press editors relaxed. She had terrorized them for years, berating them for crimes like putting a one-column head on a bull-show story and burying it back among the gall-bladder ads. They relaxed too soon. Cora kept right on berating them until she died.