To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823–1839 (review)

In an 1825 letter about the proposed marriage between her sister Harriett Gold and the Cherokee man Elias Boudinot, Mary Gold Brinsmade articulates what could very well be the thoughts of today's reader: "Harriet never appeared more interesting than she does at present" (105). Indeed.

In To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823–1839, Theresa Strouth Gaul presents us with a fascinating glimpse into the life of an interracial couple whose proposed marriage was so scandalous to Gold's hometown of Cornwall, Connecticut, that Harriet's brother burned their images in effigy. Gold and Boudinot (born Gallegina or Buck Watie) met while the latter was attending Cornwall's Foreign Mission School; the name of the institution perfectly captures its ambivalence about its students: the intent to "civilize" Indians through Christian teachings—to draw them into the fold—coexisted with a sense of these Indians as always "foreign" and, as such, always removed from the domestic values the school claimed to instill. A student's marriage to a white woman brought this contradiction to the fore. Their union was all the more threatening, Gaul suggests, because it followed on the heels of another interracial marriage: that of Elias's cousin John Ridge and Sarah Northrop, the white daughter of the school's steward (8).

Gaul's extensive introduction is a useful contribution to recent reconsiderations of Elias Boudinot. Long vilified for signing the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, which was followed a few years later by the forced Cherokee removal to Indian Territory, Boudinot has been known by most scholars, Theda Perdue writes, as one whose "historical reputation is, at best, tarnished" (qtd. in Gaul 65). Maureen Konkle's recent interpretation of Boudinot as a strategist would be helpful here: his choices are troubling, she argues in Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, only if one insists on seeing the Cherokee nation at the time as a supposedly pure cultural body rather than a complex political one (50). To focus on Boudinot's relationship with his wife and her family through epistles is to render him a more sympathetic figure; he emerges in these letters as a thoughtful husband who is devastated by Harriet's early death in 1836.

Unfortunately, no letters from Boudinot during their embattled courtship have been recovered, so Gaul is left to cobble together this stage of his life with others' words. In their absence, I wonder if the readers would be better served if Boudinot's famous speech, "An Address to the Whites," were included here, perhaps in an appendix. His call for membership in what he calls the "American family" would provide an interesting parallel to his campaign for inclusion in Gold's domestic circle.

In addition to Boudinot's address, Gaul might also have included a discussion of the letters' resemblance to epistolary novels like Hannah Foster's The Coquette. The following words from Harriett's relatives, who regard her engagement as catastrophic, seem drawn from the pages of Foster's bestselling novel: "The dye is cast, Harriet is gone, we have reason to fear" and "They may yet do it; & if [Harriett] must die for an Indian or have him, I do say she had as well die, as become the cause of so much lasting evil as the marriage will occasion" (81, 121–22). Such comparisons would shore up a literary analysis of these letters, helping us think about how a real-life Anglo-Indian romance related to and revised epistolary and sentimental conventions. As outrageous as the Gold-Boudinot marriage was thought to be, it had important literary ancestors.

The last section of Gaul's book, which includes the letters Harriett and Elias wrote to her relatives after their marriage, is a poignant affirmation of Cherokee nationhood...