By Catharine Melin-Moser
Born into slavery in Virginia in 1845, Millie Ringold moved to Washington, D.C. after emancipation, working as a nurse and servant for Major Nelson B. Switzer of the 3rd U.S. Cavalry. With the major and his family, she came up the Missouri River by steamship to Fort Benton, Montana Territory, in the centennial year of 1876. When a year later Switzer received transfer orders, Millie elected to remain in Fort Benton crowded with hopeful miners.
One gold strike after another energized the miners in scattered settlements across the Montana frontier. Word of a strike at Yogo Creek in the Little Belt Mountains reached Fort Benton. Millie joined the rush. She bought two condemned Army mules and a wagon, and her load of provisions included a barrel of whiskey. Reaching the camp of Yogo City, she was possibly the only black person and only woman in camp.
Growing especially fond of Millie, the miners gave her the sobriquet “Bonanza Queen of Yogo City.” She cheered them by playing her favorite tunes on the mouth harp, hand saw, washboard, dishpan or whatever else was handy. Her admirers said she could make more music with an empty 5-gallon oil can than a pianist could with his piano. A great source of wonderment was her double row of front teeth and two tusklike canines protruding from her lower jaw. The miners often begged her to open her mouth so they could gawk at the rare dental phenomenon.
Meanwhile, the gold seekers found only scattered nuggets in their sluice boxes. Slavishly gold-oriented, the miners drifted away, and Millie bought up many claims, certain there remained a seam of gold only she would find.
By 1899 a British syndicate, whose investors discovered high-quality sapphires in the area, had opened the English Mine along Yogo Creek. Among those who came to oversee the sapphire mine was 25-year-old Englishman Charles t. Gadsden. Though he had neither the education nor prior experience for the job, he demonstrated unswerving loyalty and superb ability as a manger and was eventually promoted to resident supervisor. Charles came to admire Millie for her tough- as-a-bear brawn as she worked her claims dressed in men’s overalls or skirts made from gunnysacks. Short and squat, she presented quite a figure when driving, perched on the edge of the wagon seat, her feet dangling well above the foot of the driver’s box. On one occasion she drove the wagon straight across an icy river, shouting to her mules, “Ho! Go long! Git in da. Pull ‘em out!” Witnesses were in awe.
When too crippled by age and rheumatism to work her claims or drive her team, Mille eked out a living taking in washing and raising poultry. On his own initiative, Charles had the mine’s wagon and team haul supplies to Millie at no cost.
In December 1906, Millie fell gravely ill. A doctor was summoned from nearby Utica. Accounts of her death vary, but according to Charles, “She begged Dr. Poska to bury her in old Yogo, and he said, ‘I cannot promise Millie, but I will do my best.’” Despite her wishes, county officials overruled such burial arrangements as too expensive. Charles personally drove the wagon that was used to transport Millie’s body from Yogo City to a plot in the Utica Cemetery.
On Millie’s death Montana gained its newest ghost town, for the population at the diggings had dwindled from hundreds in 1879 to a handful and then to one — Millie Ringold, Bonanza Queen of Yogo City.