Patricia Ellis

Patricia Ellis has a family connection to Yukon history. Her grandfather, Joshua (Klondike Josh) Ritchey, was from a small town in Manitoba. He joined the Klondike gold rush in 1898, leaving his wife and four small children with relatives. He claimed to have worked for the NWMP as a guide on the Chilkoot. He made some money and when he returned home, built the Klondike Hotel – an eighteen-room hotel with dining room and a bar. Liquor was his undoing and the hotel went into bankruptcy and was torn down in 1920. He drifted away from the family about 1910. Patricia Ellis moved to Whitehorse in 1953 after a couple of years spent as a starving art student in Winnipeg. (Patricia Ellis, Yukon Sketchbook. Castlegar, BC: LKL Consulting. 1992: 78-79, 85.)) Accommodation was hard to find in Whitehorse and most houses were without plumbing or insulation. Pat and her girlfriend rented one of the half army barracks in Whiskey Flats for thirty dollars a month. Murphy would pay a weekly visit with his trailer with several barrels welded together as a honey bucket collector. His contraption was a familiar sight going down Main Street. “The Flats” was a collection of shacks placed a few feet from one another. Pat recalls that one building arrived overnight, was dumped off crookedly, partially blocking the road, but people emerged in the morning and left for work. In the summer of 1953, Pat worked at the Taylor and Drury store at the corner of First and Main. It was the largest store in Whitehorse.¹⁾

Pat raised a family of three children and sold her paintings as an additional source of income before starting to work at the Whitehorse Star print shop doing pasteup, laying out the newspapers by hand. In 1969, she took a five-year contract to market and sell local handmade craft in a store on Main Street, Whitehorse. She purchased moccasins, hats, and mitts from artists like Annie Smith, Sophie Miller, and the Chambers family. After five years, Lorraine Joe took over the business which is still running as the Indian Craft Shop.²⁾

Pat Ellis is an artist, and a Whitehorse author interested in Yukon history. She has painted murals in Atlin and in Whitehorse at City Hall and the Yukon Transportation Museum among other places. In 1992, she published Yukon Sketchbook: A Travellers Companion, a collection of drawings of historical places and events. In 2015, she published The Squatters of Downtown Whitehorse, a collection of stories and photographs about Whiskey Flats, Moccasin Flats, and Sleepy Hollow. In 2023, she published Klondike Gold Legacy of American Missionary Father William H. Judge S.J.

Patricia Ellis received a Heritage Award from the Yukon Historical and Museums Association in 2016, and in 2019 she was one of the first Yukoners to be named to the Order of Yukon.