Harriet R. Gold Boudinot

Harriett was the youngest of fourteen children of Colonel Benjamin and Eleanor Gold of Cornwall, Connecticut; they were a prominent Congregationalist family of English descent.

The announcement of the Gold-Boudinot engagement, about a year after another interracial marriage in Cornwall, caused scandal and protest in the town.

Both Cherokee men were from the elite of their nation and met their future wives while in Cornwall as students at the Foreign Mission School.

[4] Colonel Benjamin Gold, Harriet's father, was a representative to the General Assembly and routinely traveled to Hartford or New Haven on government affairs.

[6] The family was closely connected with its missionary interests; Harriett's older sisters, Mary and Flora, had married an agent and the assistant principal of the school, respectively.

Boudinot's cousin John Ridge, also a student of the Foreign Mission School, in 1825 married Sarah Bird Northrup, a young local woman.

[12] He wrote that the match was “the fruit of the missionary spirit and caused by the conduct of the clergymen at that place and its vicinity who are agents of the school.” He added, it was an “affliction, mortification, and disgrace of the relatives of the young woman... who has thus made herself a squaw, and connected her race to a race of Indians.”[11] Bruce mocked the white men of Cornwall, saying they were “cast into the shade by their colored and tawny rivals.”[13] The Golds and seven other Cornwall families took Bruce to task in letters published in the Connecticut Journal in August 1825.

[3] As her parents tried to talk Harriett out of her wish, she grew ill, “hovering between life and death.”[15] Her cousin Dr. Samuel Gold felt the outlook was bleak.

[16] Her sister Mary describes her parents' reasoning: “that they might be found against God—and some time during H[arriet]'s sickness they told her they should oppose her no longer, she must do what she thought best.”[16] Gold wrote to Elias of his change of heart, but difficulties remained.

The Reverend Joseph Harvey of Goshen, Connecticut, an influential agent of the Foreign Mission School, met with Harriet.

I remember the trials I had to encounter—the thorny path I had to tread, the bitter cup I had to drink—but a consciousness of doing right—a kind and affectionate devoted husband, together with many other blessings have made amends for all.

Truly I have, ere this, entered upon the 'sober realities of married life',—and if tears have been shed for me on that account—I can now pronounce them useless tears.”[27] The Boudinot family was well liked by the Cherokee community, and were visited by friends from the North.

In her letters home, she often expressed her concerns for Indian welfare in political terms; this contrasts with the religious arguments she had used to persuade her family to accept her engagement.

[33] The matrilineal structure meant that children of the rare unions between Cherokee fathers and white mothers had no official social or political place in the Nation.

In 1825, following Ridge's marriage, the Cherokee Nation passed a law that children born to Cherokee fathers and white mothers were “entitled to all the immunities and privileges enjoyed by citizens descending from the Cherokee race, by the mother's side.”[34] In her book, To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters 1823-1839, Theresa Strouth Gaul wrote that the law was inspired by Ridge's marriage and Boudinot's engagement, as they came from prominent families, and the nation wanted to protect the status of their children.

They believed that removal to Indian Territory was inevitable and sought to make the best deal for the nation to protect its future.

After completing education up to age 18, son Elias Cornelius Boudinot returned to the West, settling in Fayetteville, Arkansas.