Logan
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Logan (c. 1725–1780) was a Mingo American Indian leader in the era before the American Revolutionary War, whose revenge for the killing of his family members by American frontiersmen helped spark the 1774 conflict known as Dunmore's War. Logan became famous for a speech, later known as "Logan's Lament", which he supposedly delivered after the war. Important details about Logan have been disputed by scholars, including his name and whether or not the words of "Logan's Lament" were actually his.
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[edit] Identity debate
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."[1] 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.[2] 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.[2]
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...."[3] 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.
[edit] Yellow Creek massacre
Logan's friendly relations with white ? 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. Logan longed for revenge. 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.
[edit] "Logan's Lament"
Logan was probably 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".
[edit] Logan's Letter
"To Captain Cressap - What did you kill my people on Yellow Creek for. The white People killed my kin at Coneestoga a great while ago, & I though[t nothing of that.] But you killed my kin again on Yellow Creek, and took m[y cousin prisoner] then I thought I must kill too; and I have been three time[s to war since but] the Indians is not Angry only myself."
Captain Joh[n Logan][4]
Captain Logan (Clan Chief Logan) of the Virginian Loyal Foresters was speaking about the Indians of the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia Region, particularly the Delaware and Iroquois. He was not meaning the Lower Indians some 200 miles down the Ohio Valley called the "Lower Indians." He was not from the Kentucky region. Some of those along the Kentucky shores had been river pirating along side white renagades according to a number of writers. From the Big Sandy, Scioto to the Miami rivers is well reported as being a "hot spot" of trouble for the transport canoers and flatboats at that time. The "Falls of Ohio" was a Cherokee-Mohawk stronghold (Iroquois) which had become safe for the British from the previous period before the French and Indian War.
The Loyal Foresters were ordered disband in the Spring of 1775, one of the last acts of the Virginia's House of Burgesses Committee actions before the American Revolution. Logan was a veteran of Pontiac's War on the British side and qualified for a land warrant for French and Indian War service. Had all other officials in the east recognized Indian service as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, he would have a lawful patent deed through his cliniceans efforts. This was the motivation to do the frontier "chores" for the "Virginia Counsel" in the east and Lord Dunmore. Logan broke off from the Virginian Indian Clinician John Connolly junior's Loyal Foresters (Ohio Company, 1748) connection after the Yellow Creak Massacre. These had protected the Fur Company's Canoe transporters (Canawagh) through the decades of river pirating and hostilities before Dunmore ordered their disbanding in the late Spring of 1775.[5] This had been by the instructions of the Burgesses' Committee only a few weeks before that "sudden change in politics" soon to become the American Revolution.
[edit] 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 the town of Logan, Ohio and Logan County, West Virginia. Chief Logan Reservation a boyscout camp in southwestern Ohio. 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.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 343.
- ^ a b Jennings, "James Logan".
- ^ White, Middle Ground, 358.
- ^ From Documentary History of Dunmore's War, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1905), pp. 246-47 http://www.wvculture.org/history/dunmore/loganletter.html (4/30/2009)
- ^ Foote Note: The massacre of some of Logan's people was the subject of the Condolence Speech of May 1774. Within this hints that Shawnee Chief Cornstalk knew well who Logan and the clinician Connolly was. The Pan-Shawnee directly accused Connolly (Connolly as a boy had been to the Scioto Village in 1753 (the year Susannna his mother died) with his uncle inlaw George Croghan) as the one constantly travelling up and down the Ohio Valley and building forts and Sundry Places. Connolly's letters in the "Washington Papers" at Congress Library also supports this constant travelling and Loyal Foresters of which Logan was a branches Captain.
[edit] 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.
