Journey of the Scottish Rings

William Logan came from Scotland to the United States as a young man. Before he left home, his father gave him a signet ring carved with the family crest that had been in the family for generations.   Logan always wore this ring. He also wore a masonic ring he greatly treasured. William Logan served in both the Mexican and Civil Wars. As Captain in the Seventh Infantry, Company A, he came to Montana the day after Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn.  A year later in August of 1877, Captain Logan died at the Battle of the Big Hole. Indians desecrated the bodies of the dead. Captain Logan’s fingers were cut off and the rings taken. Logan’s wife advertised in the papers to recover the rings, but had no luck. Three years later, a Nez Perce was killed near the Canadian border; he had the signet ring. It was traded and bartered until Bill Todd, a friend of Captain Logan’s, recognized it in the possession of an old trapper. He persuaded the trapper to give up the ring and took it to Captain Logan’s son. Sometime later, the son was living at the Blackfeet Agency when an Indian woman came into the post wearing his father’s masonic ring. He bought the ring from her. She told him that a few months after the Big Hole battle, the Blackfeet and Piegans fought the Nez Perce. Her husband took the masonic ring from a fallen Nez Perce and wore it until his death. It then passed to his wife who was wearing it when Logan’s son saw it on her finger. Those rings came full circle, but they had quite a journey getting there.