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Identity debate
Little is known about Logan's life before 1774. According to historian Richard White, even before the killing of his family Logan was "already a deeply disturbed man who believed himself pursued by evil manitous." Historian Helen Hornbeck Tanner describes him as "a well-respected man of French and Cayuga heritage who had lived in Philadelphia during part of the French and Indian War." During the early 1770s, he lived in a village called "Logan's Town" at the mouth of Beaver Creek, about thirty miles downstream from Pittsburgh.[1]
Scholars agree that Logan was a son of Shikellamy, an important diplomat for the Iroquois Confederacy. However, as historian Anthony F. C. Wallace has written, "Which of Shikellamy's sons was Logan the orator has been a matter of dispute."[2] Logan the orator has been variously identified as Tah-gah-jute, Tachnechdorus (also spelled "Tachnedorus" and "Taghneghdoarus"), Soyechtowa, Tocanioadorogon, Talgayeeta, the "Great Mingo", James Logan, and John Logan.
The name "Tah-gah-jute" was popularized in an 1851 book by Brantz Mayer entitled Tah-gah-jute: or Logan and Cresap. However, historian Francis Jennings wrote that Mayer's book was "erroneous from the first word of the title" and instead identified Logan as James Logan, also known as Soyechtowa and Tocanioadorogon.[3] Historians who agree that Logan the orator was not named "Tah-gah-jute" sometimes identify him as Tachnechdorus, although Jennings identifies Tachnechdorus as Logan the orator's older brother.
Logan's father Shikellamy, variously identified as a Cayuga or Oneida, worked closely with Pennsylvania official James Logan in order to maintain the Covenant Chain relationship with the colony of Pennsylvania. Following a Native American practice, the man who would become Logan the Mingo took the name "James Logan" out of admiration for his father's friend.[3]
Iroquois who migrated to the Ohio Country were often called "Mingos." Logan the Mingo is usually identified as a Mingo "chief", but historian Richard White has written that "He was not a chief. Kayashuta and White Mingo were the Mingo chiefs. Logan was merely a war leader...."[4] Like his father, Logan maintained friendly relationships with white settlers moving from eastern Pennsylvania and Virginia into the Ohio Country, the region which is now Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and western Pennsylvania.
Yellow Creek massacre
Logan's friendly relations with white settlers changed with the Yellow Creek Massacre of 30 April 1774, in which a group of Virginia frontiersmen led by Daniel Greathouse murdered about 21 Mingos, among them Logan's mother, daughter, brother, nephew, sister, and cousin, at the mouth of Yellow Creek, near present-day Wellsville, Ohio along the Ohio River. Logan's daughter, Toonay, was heavily pregnant and nearly ready to give birth at the time of the massacre. She had been tortured while alive and disemboweled. Her fetus was ripped from her body and both, she and the fetus, scalped. The rest of the Mingos were also scalped. Scalping, according to Native Americans beliefs, meant that war had been declared.
Influential tribal chiefs in the region, such as Cornstalk (Shawnee), White Eyes (Lenape), and Guyasuta (Seneca/Mingo), attempted to negotiate a peaceful resolution lest the incident develop into a larger war, but by Native American custom Logan had the right to retaliate, and he intended to do just that. The chiefs managed to have Logan agree to take out his vengeance only on Virginians, not Pennsylvanians.
Leading a war party of 13 Shawnees and Mingos, Logan attacked settlements west of the Monongahela River. He and his warriors killed numerous settlers, many of them women and children. White settlers fled in droves, and the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, responded by going to war against the Mingos and Shawnees, in the war that bears his name: Dunmore's War. Some of Dunmore's contemporaries, and some subsequent historians, have suspected that Dunmore had a hand in provoking the Yellow Creek Massacre with the intention of seizing the Ohio Country from the natives before the rival colony of Pennsylvania did so.
"Logan's Lament"
Logan was probably not at the Battle of Point Pleasant, the only major battle of Dunmore's War. Following the battle, Dunmore's army marched into the Ohio Country and compelled the Ohio Indians to agree to a peace treaty. According to tradition, Logan refused to attend the negotiations and instead issued a speech that would become famous:
I appeal to any white man to say, if ever he entered Logan's cabin hungry, and he gave him not meat; if ever he came cold and naked, and he clothed him not. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan remained idle in his cabin, an advocate for peace. Such was my love for the whites, that my countrymen pointed as they passed, and said, Logan is the friend of the white men. I have even thought to live with you but for the injuries of one man. Col. Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood, and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This has called on me for revenge. I have sought it: I have killed many: I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country, I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbour a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one.
The speech was printed in colonial newspapers, and in 1782 Thomas Jefferson reprinted it in his book Notes on the State of Virginia. The authenticity of the speech is the subject of much controversy, however. The tree under which he supposedly gave the speech became famous as the "Logan Elm".
Later life and legacy
The remainder of Logan's life is shrouded in obscurity. Along with many other Ohio natives, he participated in the American Revolutionary War against the Americans. He was apparently murdered around Detroit in 1780, possibly by a nephew.
Various places carry Logan's name, such as Logan County, West Virginia. Chief Logan High School was the former name of a high school in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, now known as Indian Valley High School. Logan Elm High School in Circleville, Ohio is named after the place where Logan supposedly made his famous speech, and there is a park named Logan Elm Park in the same county.
Notes
References
- Hurt, R. Douglas. The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720-1830. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
- Jennings, Francis. "James Logan". American National Biography. 13:836–37. Ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-19-512792-7.
- Sugden, John. Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8032-4288-3.
- Tanner, Helen Hornbeck. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History. Norman, OK, 1987.
- Wallace, Anthony F. C. Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. Cambridge: Belknap, 1999.
- White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York, 1991.
External links
- Logan Elm State Memorial in Ohio
- Chief Logan State Park, West Virginia
- "The Story of Logan" — excerpt from Wallace's Jefferson and the Indians
