Alice Diminy

Quick Facts

Significance:

Determined prospector in NV, Restaurateur & mining camp personality

Date of Birth:

1852

Date of Death:

1948

Alice Diminy’s life started across the globe from where she would gain her fame. She was born in 1852 in Bavaria but lost her parents rather young. Documentation from her early years is scarce, but historian Sally Zanjani was able to piece together that after her parents died, she visited Paris, Poland, and Egypt and spoke at least four languages fluently. She eventually decided to take her adventure across the Atlantic, arriving in New York City where she ran a restaurant. Her multilingual background made it easy for her to converse with her customers and to run a rather successful restaurant. It is unclear if she left New York for a reason other than her insatiable wanderlust, but she was soon in Louisiana where she fell ill with malaria and had to sell her silverware to pay her bills. 

With no more worldly possessions, Diminy had no qualms packing her bag and hiking out west. She arrived in San Francisco, just in time for the 1906 Earthquake. She decided to leave to prospect minerals and left soon after for Nevada, leaving behind a husband who went to Alaska to mine. She spent some time prospecting in Goldfield and Tonopah before ending up in Rhyolite, where she ran a small saloon. She sold soup and sandwiches, as well as beers for twenty five cents—half what her competitors charged. It was here that Diminy became “Happy Days” Diminy; she fed a “bum” who remarked 
“Oh, happy day,” when asked how her food was. She was so optimistic that the name stuck for the rest of her life and she even named her Rhyolite saloon the Happy Days. 

Never one to stay in place too long, Diminy soon moved on to Lida with her lover A.W. Shipway. She ran another restaurant in Lida while grubstaking with Shipway. Perhaps the most consistent thing in Diminy’s life was her belief that there was something more out there for her. In Lida, she took up the hard labor of shoveling and panning for minerals at the age of 54. Ever the enigma, Diminy also dabbled in poetry. One of her poems was even published in a 1906 mining camp newsletter. She came to be known by her uniform of Levi jeans, red and white checked shirt, Stetson and boots. Despite all of this work, no one really knew how she made enough to even feed herself. In response, she once said:  

"This desert is a free country. No one needs to be a pauper here. Don’t stay chained to a job. Get out and see the world. It’s a beautiful world. And then find yourself a place on the desert, where you can be free. Rock your living from the sand, as I have done since 1907.” 

In 1909, Diminy appeared in a court case as a witness which turned into a mild scandal over her openness about her extramarital lover. Shipway soon left Lida, leaving Diminy to continue the hard labor of digging in Tule Canyon until a dream told her where to find some gold— and it actually panned out! One newspaper ever described her as “a woman prospector and miner, one who is no delicate, publicity seeking, effeminate imitation but the genuine article.” Her apparent lack of femininity made it reasonable for her to build her own cabin from wood she hauled herself. She was not quite as optimistic as in her later years, frequently engaging in verbal sparring matches and occasional physical scraps. She still was married again to a younger man named Herbert Jester. They worked neighboring claims and seemed to fight rather frequently. Their marriage lasted a shocking 20 years, but ended in ninety-year-old Diminy citing extreme cruelty in her divorce filing.  

In 1946, she returned to San Francisco for the winter to tell fortunes. Instead of returning in the spring, however, she was admitted to a mental hospital in the city, where she died two years later.