There's a lot to be said about Logan and the song inspired by his famous speech. The only research I've done is in secondary sources, some of which I take with a grain of salt. If you want to look further, here's a place to start: http://greatwarriorspath.blogspot.com... The events described took place in the Spring of 1774 near where Yellow Creek meets the Ohio River. The speech given by Cayuga/Mingo leader Logan (sometimes called "Logan the Orator") was printed in multiple newspapers of the day, and the subject of considerable public discussion, and even quoted by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes On the State of Virginia. The poem the speech inspired is unattributed, as far as I've been able to find, but also had some circulation, including in Lydia Sigourney's notes to her poem Traits of the Aborigines of America. As far as I know it's only been found once as a song in oral tradition, by folklorist Anne Grimes.
How I got the song is a story in itself. Benjamin Franklin, in particular, was deeply affected by political thought and practice in the Iroquois Confederacy, some 600 years old at the time. In the months leading up to the Declaration of Independence, Franklin and others sought the advice of Iroquois leaders as to how to govern a dispersed people. The flip side of this reverence for Iroquois people and political thought, among those who signed the document, was the declaration's complaint that George III had instigated fighting against whites by the "merciless Indian savages," presumably including Logan, his kin and others in the Confederation, in what whites then considered frontier.
"Fusees" are muskets. The song is clearly influenced by Romanticism's "noble savage." Understanding Logan involves a lot more than just identifying with him as a tragic character for a minute, and his speech tells a rather different story from the song, but it's a start. Filmed a little after sunrise on a dock on the May River, South Carolina, at a resort in a gated community on what was long a plantation. Part of what is currently the richest town in the state, in 1860 the area was home to a population that was predominantly (over 80%) enslaved, and for 8,000 to 10,000 years prior had been home to people who came to call themselves Yamassee. They all had names of course. They still do:
NOTE: It can be really easy to breezily adopt positions based on how they seem to resonate or go with our wardrobe. Not surprisingly, the actual impact of Iroquois thought and practice on Franklin and other white people is debated. In an excellent William and Mary M.A. thesis I discovered after my initial post, Nancy Dieter Egloff offers compelling analysis suggesting the story of the Iroquois impact on early US white people and their documents is at least partly academic folklore. It's a good story- just not necessarily the most accurate representation of history. It can be hard to budge stories once they've taken root. The thesis is from 1987! Of course stories with various relationships to truth, in whatever sense, can have their own things to say about people and, in the words of Homer Simpson "stuff that happened." That's part of why I bother singing them. Maybe just don't get too fixated.
The black bird is singing on Michigan’s shore
As sweetly and gaily as ever before.
For she knows to her mate she at pleasure can hie
And her dear little brood she is teaching to fly.
Oh alas I am undone!
Each bird and each beast are as blest in degree
All nature is cheerful and happy but me.
I will go to my tent and lie down in despair.
I will paint me with black and I’ll sever my hair. Oh…
I will sit on the shore where the hurricane blows
And reveal to the God of the tempest my woes.
I will weep for a season on bitterness fed,
For my kindred have gone to the hills of the dead…
They died not by hunger or lingering decay
The steel of the white man hath swept them away.
The snakeskin that once I so sacredly bore
I will toss with disdain to the storm beaten shore…
Oh alas…
They came to my cabin was heaven was black.
I heard not their coming and I knew not their track.
But I saw by the light of their blazing fusees
They were people engendered beyond the big seas…
I will dig up my hatchet and bend my oak bow.
By night and by day I will follow the foe
No lake shall impede me nor mountains nor snow.
Ah their blood can alone give my spirit repose….
My wife and my children! Oh spare me the tale.
For who is there now that is kin to Gehale?
My wife and my children! Oh spare me the tale,
For who is there now that is kin to Gehale?