The time: 1825. The place: Cornwall, Conn. Harriet Gold, the 19-year-old daughter of a prominent white merchant-farmer, announces her engagement to a young Indian, Elias Boudinot. Outraged locals threaten to set Harriet’s father’s house alight; her own brother burns her image in effigy in the town square. Hysterical outbursts in the newspaper result, one writer calling the couple “criminals.”

The story of Harriet, as told through her own words in To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriet Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839, by English Associate Professor Theresa Strouth Gaul is a poignant look at 19th-century race relations.

The distress and mayhem surrounding the marriage was based, as Harriet’s father wrote, “on pride and prejudice” toward Indians. Boudinot, educated in mission schools from the age of 6, had excelled at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall. Founded in 1871 and dedicated to “civilizing heathen youths around the world,” the school enrolled mainly Native Americans.

“The town’s pious people intended that the boys mix with ‘civilized’ community. But they didn’t realize that one of the by products would be attraction between the boy scholars and the local girls,” Gaul said.

To Marry An Indian comprises two sets of letters, the first sent within Connecticut, just after the engagement. Involving 13 family members, the correspondence charts Harriet’s quiet conviction that she has chosen a good man in the face of racism, outrage and skepticism by her family. The second group of letters describes life in New Echota, Ga., the Cherokee community where Harriet and Elias move after they marry. Harriet raises her children there, comes to call the Indians her people, and gives a fascinating portrait of everyday life. She and Boudinot share letter space to the family back in Connecticut. Boudinot writes often of his opposition to Indian removal.

It is a tragic story. Harriet dies of an undisclosed illness at 31, just a few months after giving birth to her sixth child. And Boudinot comes to believe that removal is the only chance for his people. His own experience of deep-seated prejudice from a community that prided itself on Christian tolerance may have led to actions that Gaul believes were “sincerely motivated, but which led to over 4,000 Cherokee deaths.”

It has been suggested that when he signed the treaty, Boudinot knew that he was forfeiting his life. He was right: He and other treaty signers were assassinated on the same day in 1839.

Letters open up passages to another time and place like nothing else can do. But it is Gaul’s 90-page introduction that sets the scene for readers unfamiliar with this crisis in American history.