Last updated: March 21, 2023
Person
Evelyn Fialla Hildegard
Copyright 1907 by Paul E. Kennedy, Goldfield, Nev.
Quick Facts
Significance:
Diamond Tooth Lil became a legendary figure of the West, She was a deeply religious woman protective of her family but unrepentant for his job in sex work.
Place of Birth:
Iglo, Hungary
Date of Birth:
09/29/1885
Date of Death:
1967
Diamond Tooth Lil spread many tales about her birth name and where she was born in an effort to protect the identity of her brother, Michael Fialla, a hardworking real estate agent and Catholic man. Born Katie Fialla in Iglo, Hungary in 1885, a time of unrest under Emperor Franz Josef. By the time she was five years old, Katie and her family fled Eastern Europe to the United States, where they settled in Youngstown, Ohio. This was an industrial town and they lived in tenement housing in an immigrant neighborhood; when her father passed away a few years after arriving in the US, the Fialla kids all pitched in to collect coal at the railroad tracks.
Katie made her own way in life in her early teens. While the rest of her family stuck to respectable means of making a living, Katie took up stealing and landed herself in jail for a week before she was even fifteen. She eloped with Percy Hildegarde who whisked her away to Chicago. Apparently Percy’s family had the marriage annulled because Katie had lied about her age, and was just 15 at the time. While Percy’s family took him home, Katie stayed in Chicago to perform in dance halls. The people she met in dance halls propelled her across the country and eventually to DEVA. According to Flinchum, “her restless feet kept her dancing up and down the Pacific Coast from Seattle to Nome, Alaska, to San Francisco’s Barbary Coast.”
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake chased Katie onto a train towards Nevada. Katie’s stories were always embellished or changing so tracing a clear chronology is something that has been difficult for historians. We can surmise she worked at dance halls in Reno and Carson City before ending up in Goldfield. There she met up with Tex Rickard, a man she met while in Chicago, who paid her $275 per week to sing and work at the Northern Saloon. That experience let her see the successes and failings of local dance halls and brothels, inspiring her to make something better.
Changing her name to Florence Hildegarde, she opened the Nevada Club in the center of the Goldfield red light district. If was there that she met Death Valley Scotty and infamous gunslinger Diamondfield Jack Davis. Davis was wealthy and he was most definitely fond of Hildegarde. Their involvement did not last long, and Lil was soon onto other excitements. Her involvement with Diamondfield Jack was probably the inspiration behind her diamond tooth, however; a dentist in Reno owed her a gambling debt and the toothy add on was his method of paying up.
From Goldfield, she moved on to Greenwater, where she gained the most fame and fell from her success in a few short years. It was in Goldfield that she struck up an inseparable friendship with Celesta Fairbanks. They were both quite religious, but were otherwise opposites in society’s eyes. They reveled in each other’s company, but eventually Greenwater too followed the boom and bust cycle of mining camps and she was being paid only in chickens; at age 23, she was already aged by the stress of boom towns.
Diamond Tooth Lil disappeared from the records for a little over a decade, but resurfaced in Boise, Idaho, running her own business and continuing to advocate for women in the Boise community. She was a generous woman but that was overshadowed by her boisterous personality that only grew as the 1930s reawakened the American idealization of the Old West. She inspired characters from Death Valley Days and Mae West’s Diamond Lil stage play. Eventually this novelty wore off and she again faced poverty. By the 1960s, she was a ward of the state of California and died peacefully in the Claremont Sanitarium in Pomona in 1967. She said that she had seen her adventures, and now, it was time to rest.