Ellen Davignon

Ellen Davignon was born in 1937 in Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada. Her mother was from Denmark and traveled to the Northwest Territories in Canada to marry Ellen's father, who was born in Denmark and raised in Greenland. During World War II, her parents moved down from the Northwest Territories where her father had mined and trapped, and he went to work helping to build the Alaska Highway and airstrips associated with the U.S. military's Lend-Lease program that was shipping aircraft to the Soviet Union. After the work dried up, her father moved the family to Whitehorse where he worked a variety of jobs. The family then lived at Johnson's Crossing along the Alaska Highway from 1945 to 1947, where her father ran a lodge. In 1968, Ellen and her husband, Phil, bought the lodge at Johnson's Crossing and operated it until 1977, then ran a campground there until 1992 when they moved into Whitehorse. After relocating to Whitehorse, Ellen wrote her "Lives of Quiet Desperation" column for the Whitehorse Star newspaper until 2005, and published the book The Cinnamon Mine: An Alaska Highway Childhood (Whitehorse, Yukon: Studio North, 1988).