Mina Benson Hubbard (1870–1956)

Mina Benson Hubbard, born on a farm in Bewdley, Ontario, Canada, trained as a nurse at the Brooklyn School for Nurses in New York City. After graduating in 1899, she worked in a small hospital on Staten Island, where she nursed journalist Leonidas Hubbard, who had contracted typhus. The couple married in 1901. She became famous for her efforts to vindicate her husband's reputation, after he died in 1903 just 30 miles from camp while exploring the wilderness of Labrador. Two years later, she led a small expedition back to the peninsula in a race with a rival explorer. She completed the route and brought back the first maps of the Naskaupi and George River valleys, notes on the flora and fauna, and a detailed description of the great caribou migration. She also photographed the native people. It was an extraordinary accomplishment for a woman of her era. In the following years, Mina Benson Hubbard gave public lectures in the USA and in Great Britain, where met her second husband, Harold Ellis. She published articles in Harper's Monthly Magazine, The Englishwoman's Review, The Windsor Magazine, and the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, among others. Her book A Woman's Way Through Labrador was published in 1908.