Harriet R. Gold Boudinot

Harriet Ruggles Gold Boudinot (1805–1836) was notable as the wife of Cherokee Elias Boudinot (Buck Watie), who became a leader in the Cherokee Nation and editor of its newspaper The Cherokee Phoenix. 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. Boudinot and Gold were married on March 28, 1826 at the Gold home. They moved to Boudinot’s home of New Echota in present-day Georgia, where they had six children before Harriett’s death in 1836.

Harriet was born June 1, 1805, or June 10, 1805, the youngest of fourteen children born to Benjamin and Eleanor Gold, part of an affluent and politically connected family in Cornwall. Her grandfather was Hezekiah Gold, a Congregationalist minister of the First Church of Cornwall. He graduated from Yale University.

Colonel Benjamin Gold, Harriet’s father, was a representative to the General Assembly and routinely traveled to Hartford or New Haven on government affairs. He was a deacon in the local ministry and had helped found the Foreign Mission School. Harriet’s brother Ruggles Gold, also a Yale graduate, played a role in the school’s founding as well. 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.

Elias Boudinot, of Cherokee and European ancestry, enrolled in the Foreign Mission School in 1818. Two years later he was baptized in the Christian faith. He had studied at a Moravian mission school in New Echota, Georgia. Elias and other students were frequent guests at the Gold home. Harriett, as well as her brothers and sisters, engaged in correspondence with several of the Cherokee students, even after they had departed from Cornwall. She and her brother Franklin both wrote to Boudinot. Catherine, a young Cherokee girl, exchanged letters with Harriett and her sister Flora.

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