Boudinot, Elias, 1802-1839

Rejoices that she, like Brainerd and Eliot, is a warm friend to the original inhabitants of the land; Elias Boudinot, his fellow Cherokee, has left for Charleston.

Book-length manuscripts, research and project reports, and administrative records generated by the W.P.A. Historic Sites and Federal Writers' Projects for Oklahoma during the 1930's. Arranged by county and by subject, there are reports on biographies, birthplaces and homes of prominant Oklahomans, business enterprises and industries, judicial centers, banks and banking, Masonic orders, soil conservation, and land runs; on historic sites, including cemeteries and burial sites, churches and missions, schools, towns and ghost towns, post offices, roads and trails, stage coaches and stagecoach lines, ranches, ruins and antiquities, bridges, crossings and ferries, battlefields, trading posts and stores, military posts and camps, and the state parks; on Indians of North America in Oklahoma, including agencies and reservations, treaties, tribal government centers, councils and meetings, chiefs and leaders, judicial centers, jails and prisons, stomp grounds, and ceremonial rites and dances; and on geogrpahic features and regions, arranged by place name, including caverns, mountains, rivers, springs, and prairies. In addition, there are transcripts of interviews conducted with oilfield workers regarding the petroleum industry in Oklahoma.

The collection consists of papers concerning Elias Boudinot, an Indian whose original name was Galagina, or Buck Oowatie, and who became editor of the "Cherokee Phoenix", New Echota, Cherokee Nation. Early correspondence relates chiefly to Boudinot's marriage to Harriet Gold, and the Gold family controversy over intermarriage with an Indian. Other correspondence relates to the dispute between the Cherokee Nation and the state of Georgia, the Supreme Court decision of 1832, President Jackson's refusal to halt Georgia's annexation of the Cherokee Nation and Boudinot's support of John Ridge, who favored withdrawal of the Cherokee Nation to the West.

The collection consists of one letter by or from the office of C.E. Haynes of Washington City, dated February 2, 1838, announcing the intention of the "Niles's Register" editor to publish Elias Boudinot's "Exposition."

These examples of printing in the Cherokee language include the following five pamphlets: The epistles of John ; A treatise on marriage ; The negro servant / Legh Richmond ; Poor Sarah / Elias Boudinot ; The dairyman's daughter / Legh Richmond with Bob the sailor boy / G.C. Smith. Two of the pamphlets were printed by John Candy.

Elias Boudinot (Cherokee: ᎦᎴᎩᎾ ᎤᏩᏘ, romanized: Gallegina Uwati, lit. 'Stand firm'; 1802 – June 22, 1839), also known as Buck Watie) was a writer, newspaper editor, and leader of the Cherokee Nation. He was a member of a prominent family, and was born and grew up in Cherokee territory, now part of present-day Georgia. His Cherokee name reportedly means either 'male deer' or 'turkey.' Born to parents of mixed Cherokee and European ancestry and educated at the Foreign Mission School in Connecticut, he became one of several leaders who believed that acculturation was critical to Cherokee survival. He was influential in the period of removal to Indian Territory.

In 1826, Boudinot had married Harriet R. Gold, the daughter of a prominent New England family in Cornwall, Connecticut. He met her while a student at the FMS in town. Following his cousin John Ridge's marriage to a local woman there in 1825, Boudinot's marriage was controversial and opposed by many townspeople. But to protect their future children, the Cherokee National Council had passed a law in 1825 enabling the descendants of Cherokee fathers and white mothers to be full citizens of the Cherokee. (Formerly, they had no official place in the matrilineal tribe, as children belong to their mother's clan and people, and the white women were outsiders.) The Boudinots returned to Cherokee homelands (now in Georgia) to live at New Echota. They reared their six children as Cherokee.

Boudinot, with numerous other leading Cherokee, particularly those who had been educated outside the tribe, believed that removal was inevitable in the face of the numbers of United States settlers encroaching on their lands. He and several allies signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, hoping to gain the best conditions for their people. Cession of communal lands was adamantly opposed by John Ross, the Principal Chief, and the full-blood members of tribe, who comprised the majority. The following year, the tribe was forced to cede most of its lands in the Southeast, and remove to west of the Mississippi River in Indian Territory in the late 1830s.

After Harriet died in 1836, Boudinot moved with his children to Indian Territory. After Removal, in June 1839 he and three other Treaty Party leaders were assassinated there by members of the Ross faction, known as the National Party. The orphaned Boudinot children were sent to be raised by his parents-in-law in Cornwall, Connecticut, which was believed more safe. They attended school there. After Boudinot's son Elias Cornelius Boudinot was educated, he returned west, settling in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He became an attorney and active in tribal and Democratic Party politics. He represented the Cherokee Nation in the Confederate Congress as a non-voting delegate. During the war, the majority of the tribe sided with the Confederacy, hoping to gain an Indian state if they won.

The Ridge family papers include John Ridge's 1835 journal while he was a Cherokee Delegate to Washington D.C. when the Cherokee Nation was in the process of ceding all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi. Also included in the collection are letters from Arkansas, photographs, newspaper clippings, printed material, poetry by John Rollin Ridge, Elias Boudinot's published An address to the whites (1826), and a leather pouch.