Honora “Diamond Lil” Ornstein (1883 - 1975)
Honora Ornstein was born into a prominent family in the cattle business in Butte, Montana. During the gold rush, she first set up a house in Skagway where she had the best piano player in town. It was rumoured that Lil had connections to the underworld in Chicago but she was honest in running her house.1) Ornstein came early to the Klondike and stayed for many years.2)
Orstein was nearly six feet tall, very good looking, and always wore diamond jewellery.3) She also had fine diamonds implanted in her front and eye teeth. She was a variety entertainer engaged in acting, singing, and dancing but her talents were marginal. One reviewer commented that she was better at pretending to be a fleshy statue than as a serpentine dancer. She wore a gold snake bracelet studded with 125 real diamonds during her stage act.4)
Lil left the Klondike with a fortune. Alexander Pantages used her as one of his headliners in various theatres in the United States and Canada. In the 1920s, she retired to Seattle where she invested in apartment buildings. She married George Miller and divorced him a week before she learned of an inheritance from her mother of $150,000. She intended to form a dramatic stock company, but her mind began to fail and in 1935 friends had her committed to a state hospital in Yakima where she lived for the next twenty-five years. Her money ran out in the late 1950s. She was moved to a rest home in 1960 and her expenses were paid for by the state.5)