James S. Buchanan, a field worker for the WPA, interviewed Mrs. Elinor Boudinot Meigs at Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, March 2–4, 1937.

I was the fourth child of William Penn Boudinot and Caroline Fields Boudinot. Born March 8, 1862 in Illinois District, Cherokee Nation. Father was the son of Elias Boudinot, a full-blood Cherokee and Harriet Gold Boudinot, a white woman. My mother was the daughter of Thomas Fields and Nancy Downing Fields, both Cherokees. She was born in Tennessee, reared in the Cherokee Nation and educated in Dwight Mission.

I remember my mother telling of a peculiar incident that happened during the raid that the Pin Indians made upon our home. She said father had a large amount of gold hid in an old leather satchel hanging on the wall, and during the search they were making of the house, an Indian reached up and taken hold of the old satchel, and just as he did so, his attention was attracted by a beautiful bright colored blanket that hung near[. H]e left the old satchel and took the blanket and a side saddle that was hanging by it and walked out of the house, leaving father’s money as though they were not looking for it.

At the time of the Civil War there yet existed a factional feeling that originated in Georgia between the Ross and Ridge[-]Boudinot factions prior to the moving of the Cherokees from east of the Mississippi River to the Indian Territory, and caused the assassination of my grandfather, Elias Boudinot, Major Ridge and his son John Ridge on June 20, 1839, and as my father was a southern sympathizer the Civil War furnished an opportunity for renewal of persecutions by the opposing faction. For that reason and the safety of the family was the cause of my father leaving the Cherokee Nation during the Civil War.

When he considered it safe for the family he started on the return trip to the old home in the Cherokee Nation. All of our possessions in a wagon drawn by an ox team. We crossed the Canadian River at the old Tom Starr place where my brother Frank Boudinot was born while there in camp August 20, 1866.

I never attended public schools as my early education was attained at home[,] being taught by my mother until I was fourteen years of age. I was then placed in the Cherokee Female Seminary at Tahlequah, graduating in 1881. I taught in the grade schools and Cherokee schools for about ten years.

I was married to John H. Meigs September 2, 1890 and seven children were born.¹

ENDNOTES

¹ Elinor Boudinot Meigs, Interview 0000, vol. 62, Fort Gibson, Okla., March 2–4, 1937, 75–77, Indian Pioneer Papers, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Okla.