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.

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." 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.Jennings, "James Logan". 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.

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...." 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.