Christoph von Graffenried was born in Switzerland on November 15, 1661. In 1710 he led a business venture in which he brought poor Swiss and German refugee families from Europe to the newly-established town of New Bern in North Carolina. Graffenried's settlers soon had many disagreements with the local Tuscarora who had lived in the area for generations and who saw the Swiss settlers as invaders. In September 1711 while on a surveying expedition up the Neuse River looking for new lands and trading routes, Graffenried and John Lawson, the colony's surveyor general, were attacked and captured by the Tuscarora. Though they executed Lawson, the Tuscarora released Graffenreid, who made arrangements to move his remaining settlers north to Virginia. In the spring of 1713 he left for England and never returned to the Americas, dying in Switzerland in 1743.