Prior to this he served as an officer of the Confederate States Army in the Trans-Mississippi Theater of the American Civil War.

[1] He was the mixed-race son of Elias and Harriet Ruggles (née Gold) Boudinot, who was from Connecticut.

In 1839 his father and three other leaders were assassinated by opponents in the tribe as retaliation for having ceded their homeland in the 1835 Treaty of New Echota.

In 1868 he and his uncle Stand Watie opened a tobacco factory, to take advantage of provisions under the nation's new 1866 treaty with the United States.

It was confiscated for non-payment of taxes, and their case went to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled against them.

Boudinot began to lobby for Native Americans to be granted United States citizenship in order to be protected by the Constitution.

He supported proposals for termination of Cherokee sovereignty and the allotment of communal land to tribal members, as was passed under the Dawes Act.

As this would extinguish tribal land rights, Boudinot also worked to establish the state of Oklahoma and have it admitted to the Union.

"[2] Born August 1, 1835, at New Echota, Cherokee Nation (present-day Gordon County, Georgia); Elias Cornelius Boudinot was the son of Elias, a Cherokee National leader, and his wife Harriet Ruggles (née Gold) Boudinot (1805–1836), a young woman of English-American descent from a prominent family in Cornwall, Connecticut.

The senior Elias Boudinot became editor of the Cherokee Phoenix from 1828-1832; it was the first newspaper founded by a Native American nation and published in their language.

In 1839, when Boudinot was four years old, his father and other Treaty Party leaders were assassinated by Cherokee opponents for having given up the communal tribal lands, which was considered a capital offense.

[4] The following year Boudinot was chosen as the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic State Central Committee and monitored rising tensions in the country.

The federal government declared any remaining land as "surplus" and allowed its sale to non-Native Americans.

[6] He also practiced law in Arkansas with the politician Robert Ward Johnson (1814-1879), who had been elected to both houses of Congress before the Civil War.

He frequently spoke on the lecture circuit about Cherokee issues and development in the West, and was considered a prominent orator.

[3] Boudinot contributed to the eventual formation of the state of Oklahoma in the early twentieth century.

Many Cherokee and others of the Five Civilized Tribes had first tried to gain passage of legislation to found a state to be controlled by Native Americans.