Although Cuming did not return to America with the Indian, he spent much of the remainder of his life in a debtor's prision-his work was an impotant factor in strenghing British influence among the Cherokee. This influence has been exaggerated by some writer's who claim that for many years these Indian's maintained in general an increasing attitude of hostility toward the French. Actually, the English had serious difficulties with the Cherokee within the next 3-4 years. The Cherokee, however, frequently sent out raiding parties against the French which brought back booty, scalps, and also prisioners. These French prisioners, according to Cherokee custom, were usually purchased from thier captors and adopted into a tribe. In this postion they were able to counter act the influence of the British traders, by arguing in favor of the French cause. One of these Frenchman, Anitone Bonnefoy, who was captured along the Ohio River in 1741, escaped the next year and managed to find his way to the french Fort Toulouse, located near the site of Montgomery Alabama. A journal of his experiences, kept by Bonnefoy, provides much information concerning the Cherokee attitude toward the English and the French, and also is one of the sources of information concerning a German Utopian Socialist, Christian Gollieb Priber, the black robe or Jesuit, who was from Saxon Germany, who was residing in the overhill Cherokee Town of Great Tellico while Bonnefoy was captive there.
Priber was considered by the English to be a French Agent, but leading authorites on the question are of opinion that he had no connections with the French government, but working quite independantly. He was a well educated native of Saxony, who was forced because of his communistic ideas to flee to England, and from there to South Carolina; from that Colony he went to the Overhill Cherokee, among whom he lived for about 7 years. According to a report of the English trader and author, James Adair, he exchanged all his possesions with the head warriors and thus made friends with them, ate, drank, slept, dance dressed and painted himself with the Indians, so that it was not easy to distinguish him from the natives. He quickly learned thier language, and by gradual advances impressed them with a very opinion of the english, representing them as a fraudulant, avaricious (sick), and encroaching people; He at the same time, inflated the artless savages with a prodigious high opinion of their own importance in the American scale of power. Using this psychological approach he attempted to achieve his chief aim; To intoduce his communistic ideas among the Indians by creating a "Kingdom of Paradise", which strangely enough he called a republic. Ludovick Grant, the English Trader, described the system as proposing "that all things should remain common amongst them, that even thier wives should be so and that childern should be looked upon as childern of the Public and be taken care of as such and not by thier natural parents. And that they should admit into thier society Creeks and Catabaw's, French, English, all colours and complexions; in short all who were of these principles, which were truly such as had no principles at all".
Actually Priber told the Indians to consider both the English and the French, "as interlopers". But since the English had a near monoploy of thier trade, the Cherokee would do well to play off the French against them. Crane, "lost Utopia" 56. This Author (pg 58) thinks the Chief aim was to create communistic federation of all the southern Indians as a "model for a republic which might later be set up in France".
ADAIR'S HISTORY OF AMERICAN INDIAN's
Pages 252-257