Harriet R. Gold Boudinot

Who was Harriet R. Gold Boudinot?

Harriet Ruggles Gold Boudinot was the American of English descent wife of the Cherokee leader Elias Boudinot, the editor of the Cherokee Nation newspaper The Cherokee Phoenix. Harriett was the youngest daughter of Colonel Benjamin and Eleanor Gold; theirs was a prominent Congregationalist family in Cornwall, Connecticut.

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 had been students at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall. 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.