BOUDINOT, Elias Cornelius, Cherokee lawyer, soldier and legislator: b. near Rome, Ga., August 1835; d. Fort Smith, Ark., 27 Sept. 1890. The maiden name of his mother was Harriet Gold. Her father was a prominent citizen of Cornwall, Conn., where his father, Elias Boudinot (Galagina), a Cherokee In dian, had been educated. Left an orphan by the death of his mother in 1836 and the assassina tion of his father in 1839, he was reared under the guardianship of his step-mother (who, like his mother, was of New England parentage and birth) and of his uncle, Stand Watie. His edu cation was begun in the tribal schools of the Cherokee Nation and completed in New Eng land. Because of the factional troubles of the Cherokee Nation, in which his family had been so tragically involved, he located in Arkansas, where he read law and engaged in newspaper work. He was sent from Washington County as a delegate to the Secession Convention which met at Little Rock, 4 March 1861, and was chosen as secretary of that body. During the Civil War he represented the Cherokee Nation in the Confederate Congress at Richmond part of the time and was also in the military service, attaining the rank of lieutenant-colonel of the regiment known as the Cherokee Mounted Rifles. He took an active and prominent part
in the protracted and fruitless Indian peace council which was held at Fort Smith, Ark., in September 1865, as also in the negotiation of the new treaties between the government of the United States and the Indians of the five civilized tribes, at Washington, D. C., during the spring and summer of 1866. He subse quently became an attorney for the Atlantic & Pacific Railway Company, in which capacity he took a radical stand in favor of the proposed individual allotment of the lands of the several reservations in the Indian Territory and the opening of the surplus lands to white settle ment. By this course he incurred the bitter enmity of his fellow tribesmen and virtually exiled and expatriated himself from citizenship and residence in the Cherokee Nation. He was a man of fine literary taste and talent, excelling both as a writer and as a speaker. During his later years he continued in the active practice of the law at Fort Smith and at Washington, D. C.