Christian Gottlieb Priber

Christian Gottlieb Priber
Also Known As:	"Prieber"
Birthdate:	March 21, 1697
Birthplace:	Zittau, Dresden, Saxony, Germany
Death:	circa 1743 (41-50) Fort Oglethorpe, Catoosa, Georgia
Immediate Family:	Son of Friederich Priber and Anna Dorothea Priber Husband of Clogoittah "Susan" Priber
Occupation:	Jesuit Priest

Managed by:	Erica Howton
Last Updated:	April 28, 2022

Also Known As:

"Prieber"

Birthdate:

March 21, 1697

Birthplace:

Zittau, Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Death:

circa 1743 (41-50)
Fort Oglethorpe, Catoosa, Georgia

Immediate Family:

Son of Friederich Priber and Anna Dorothea Priber
Husband of Clogoittah "Susan" Priber

Occupation:

Jesuit Priest

Managed by:

Erica Howton

Last Updated:

April 28, 2022

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Notes

[1463] Data from Hicks and Witt who supplied the following information -

SOUTH CAROLINA GERMAN-AMERICAN OF THE MONTH

CHRISTIAN GOTTLIEB PRIBER is one of the most intriguing German immigrants in pre-revolutionary South Carolina. ....

Priber was envied by the English traders who saw him quickly gain the confidence of the Cherokees:

"Being a great Scholar he soon made himself master of their Tongue, and by his insinuating manner Indeavoured to gain their hearts, he trimm'd his hair in the indian manner & painted as they did going generally almost naked except a shirt & a Flap" -- Ludovick Grant, principal trader at Tellico

Priber used his influence with the Indians to protect them from exploitation by traders, and worked to establish their independence and equality with their neighbors regardless of race. He taught them the use of weights and measures, and, to protect them from being cheated by traders and pack-horsemen, he constructed steelyards for their use.

Moytoy, then head chief of the Cherokee Nation, had a daughter Clogoittah whom Priber took to wife. With her, Priber had a daughter, Creat, born about 1740. With Moytoy as chief and himself as executor, Priber began to carry out his vision to create a state governed only by natural law with the fundamental rights of liberty and equality for men and women alike. All its members were to have opportunity to develop to the fullest extent, work according to their abilities, share of their talents and take of the common property according to individual needs. Children, too, were to be cared for and instructed in communal fashion by the entire village, and this new social order on an essentially moral and metaphysical basis was to welcome other Indian Nations and races, the oppressed and persecuted, debtors and slaves.

Links

Christian Gottlieb Priber was sent to this country in 1736 to try to win the country for France. Prime Minister to the Cherokee Indians. Married daughter of a Cherokee Chief. Died in British political prison in 1753 leaving behind his wife and four daughters. Information found through historian/author Thomas H. Troxel. "The Cherokees" by Grace Steele Woodwand, page 68, 1963, U of OK Press, Norman, OK (Vol 65 in The Civilization of the American Indians series) "One of the Frenchmen who came to the Cherokee country and established headquarters there around 1736 was Christian Gottlieb Priber, who represented himself as a Jesuit priest. Priber donned the Cherokee apparel and, outwardly at least, adapted himself to all the Cherokee ways and customs, thus winning a number of converts to the French cause. Onconostota, the war chief, was one of Priber's converts, and so persuaded many of his people to support Priber's erratic plan to make a communistic republic out of the Cherokee Nation. Taking the title of "His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State," Priber asserted that he had received from Moytoy, the Cherokee emperor, this title and permission to organize the tribe into the form of government just mentioned. In this government, all Cherokees were to be equal; goods were to be held in common; children were to be the property of the state; marriage was to be abolished; and each Cherokee was to work for the common good of the Nation, his only personal property to be books, paper, pen and ink." "However, Priber's influence on Oconostota and the other converts was weakened by his [capture] in 1739 by English traders, when he was en route to Fort Toulouse to render a report of his activities to the French. Priber was turned over to officials in the Georgia colony, and spent the remainder of his life in the Frederica prison. However, Priber's influence, though diminished, lived on in certain Cherokee settlements for some years. Priber converts, for example blamed the scourage of smallpox in 1738, that reduced the Cherokee population by half, on the English, whom Priber had taught the Cherokees to hate. Priber converts also accused the English of planting smallpox germs in the trading goods sold to the Cherokee." **************************** "History of the American Indians", by James Adair, first published in London, 1775, page 252 (reprinted by Samuel Cole Williams, LL.D. in 1930) "In the year 1736, the French sent into South-Carolina, one Priber, a gentleman of a curious and speculative temper. He was to transmit them a full account of that country, and proceed to the Cheerake nation, in order to seduce them from the British to the French interest. He went, and though he was adorned with every qualification that constitutes the gentleman, soon after he arrived at the upper towns of this mountainous country, he exchanged his clothes and every thing he brought with him, and by that means, made friends with the head warriors of great Telliko, which stood on a branch of the Mississippi. More effectually to answer the design of his commission, he ate, drank, slept, danced, dressed, and painted himself, with the Indians, so that it was not easy to distinguish him from the natives, -he married also with them, and being endued with a strong understanding and retentive memory, he soon learned their dialect, and by gradual advances, impressed them with a very ill opion of the English, representing them as a fraudulent, avaritious, and encroaching people: he at the same time, inflated the artless savages, with a prodigious high opion of their own disposition, and the great number of their warriors, which would baffle all the efforts of the ambitious and ill-designing British colonist."

References

GEDCOM Source

@R903229613@ Ancestry Family Trees Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com. Original data: Family Tree files submitted by Ancestry members.

GEDCOM Source

Christian Gottlieb Priber

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