/his/Anon here, first time posting in a few years. I've been trying to make a vlog about an early explorer to Appalachia - Sir Alexander Cuming. My project got paused for a while when I wasn't able to access his journals, but I was just sent photos that I don't believe have ever been posted online. tl;dr>be Alex Cum>wife has bad dream, mom dies>become a Russian mercenary, dad has a fight in Parliament and I lose everything>go full schizo remembering mom's last words and wife's dream, steal a bunch of money>hop ship to Carolina and assemble an expedition with a man named Colonel Chicken (not a colonel and not mentioned in his journal)>come back months later crowned King of all Cherokee>start schizoposting to His Brittonic Mejesty and telling him he's also the King of Persia / a Golem or something>die in fleet prison decades later asking to send the Jews to Appalachia while acting as God-kingI'll post more if there's any interest but it's a true story.
>>42921954Posting the following pages, I won't over-explain Alexander Cuming - but he seems like an early 1700s Colonel Kurtz. What stood out to me was the fact that a few years after he stirred the pot, a similarly crazy German man arrived in the same area and disappeared into the same towns that Cuming was in.Christian Gottleib Priber was the highly educated son of a cloth merchant in Zittau iirc. Unlike Cuming, who mainly wanted to promote himself as a divinely ordained leader, Priber lived with the Indians and tried to get them to unite - Creek and Cherokee, into a confederation to play off colonial powers. My memory is spotty, so I've lost most of this after a few years of not fully researching, but I believe that Priber found a relative of one of the men that Cuming was associated with and bestowed a title (Moytoy?) on him. This title was hereditary. Brits recognized the "kings" put forward by Cuming as agents to the British Empire because they were legitimately influential. My interest stems from the fact that Priber came from a family of cloth merchants in Zittau, and Cuming was still schizoposting from the Fleet Prison years after Priber died.Did Priber (Jewish? Not sure) somehow contact Cuming or one of his supporters? Fur trappers who were captured around this time report him saying that he had several hundred adventurers, hunters and traders hiding in the mountains with the Indians, ready to strike the towns along the coast and establish a "Republican... Kingdom of Paradise."He also apparently wrote a book. Contemporary newspapers detailing his capture said he was compliant at Fort Fredrica and that he bragged of having copies of this book distributed. Some niche history nerds say he was the first communist insurgent because he talked about ending private property, direct democracy, anticolonialism and free love. Who were those several hundred mountain men? How close did we get to having a millenarian Jewish-Cherokee Appalachian ethnostate?
>>42922015I'll have to do more research on this, but I'm pretty certain the Moytoy tradition was patriarchal and most Indians were matriarchal, so for the most part the "Moytoy of Tellico" and his descendants died out. If the Cuming royal line existed, it was them.But there's some niche genealogy conspiracies that suggest Priber had a child with the tribe. According to this, he lived with the Moytoy's daughter or sister, and had a girl named Cornblossom. (Do your own research, this is shoddy memory but the names are right). Her descendants call her "Princess Cornblossom" or "Queen Cornblossom," but Indians are quick to point out that they didn't have a similar concept to a King or Queen. Cuming had to openly request a crown at Tanasi Village, and they made him one on the spot, for example. My idea is that somehow, Cuming's ideas may have spread to influential people in the early 1730s, and because he was talking about Jewish liberation and founding a messianic Jewish state in Appalachia - he may have actually had material supporters of the project. The 7 or so chiefs he brought back to London were interested in forming a monarchy, and it was all over British papers. The Crown let him die in an asylum and tried not to talk about it - but he WAS given a very proper burial in Scotland. Now the question...>How many Jews made it to the overhill tribes?>How "real" was the royal line of Cuming and Priber?>Did they exchange ideas?By the way, on the last page of his journal, Cuming is learning and playing around with Hebrew words.
>>42921954Alex...who?
