JAMES LOGAN (1774)

Also called JOHN LOGAN or his Indian name TAH-GAH-JUTE.

Prominent Indian leader during the U.S. colonial period whose initial excellent relations with white settlers in Pennsylvania and the Ohio Territory deteriorated into a vendetta after the slaughter of his family in 1774.

Logan was technically a Cayuga Indian because his mother was a member of that tribe. His father Shikellamy was purportedly a White Frenchman who had been taken by the Oneida as a child and had in manhood become a chief. Chief Shikellamy became Iroquois representative at the Delaware Indian town of Shamokin and also a friend of the secretary of the colony James Logan whose name the chief´s son assumed.

Logan moved to the Ohio Valley after the French and Indian War (1754-63) and married a Shawnee.

He was never a chief but achieved renown among many Indian tribes, first because of his friendship with the white settlers and later by reason of his intense hatred of all white men.

In 1774 at the beginning of Lord Dunmore´s War against the Shawnee, Logan´s family was treacherously killed by a frontier trader named Daniel Greathouse. That was when Logan declared war on the whites with great eloquence and with a particular venom directed against Capt. Michael Cresap whom he blamed for the murder of his family in the Yellow Creek massacre (1774).

Even when the defeated Indians gathered at Chillicothe, Ohio, to make peace after the Battle of Point Pleasant (October 10), Logan refused to become reconciled although he was reported to have taken more than 30 white scalps. He continued to express his hatred of the Americans during the Revolution (1775-83) when he associated himself with the Mohawk auxiliaries of the British forces. He reportedly lost his own life at the hands of a relative.