Logan Fontenelle (May 6, 1825 – July 16, 1855), also known as Shon-ga-ska (White Horse), was a trader of Omaha and French ancestry, who served for years as an interpreter to the US Indian agent at the Bellevue Agency in Nebraska.

"[1] Fontenelle lived on the reservation and died young at the age of 30, killed with five Omaha on the tribal summer buffalo hunting trip when they were attacked by an enemy band of Sioux warriors.

Forced to accept changes to the treaty during that trip, the Omaha chiefs agreed to cede 4,000,000 acres (16,000 km2) of their land to the United States.

Within a couple of years, the Omaha removed to a reservation in northeast Nebraska in the Blackbird Hills, essentially present-day Thurston County.

[2][3] He was the oldest son of four born to Me-um-bane, a daughter of the Omaha principal chief Big Elk (1770–1846/1853), and her husband Lucien Fontenelle, a French-American fur trader from New Orleans.

His daughter Susan was educated at home with her mother and family, received extended training in the local mission schools, and married Louis Neals.

In the following decades, the Indian agent had the lead for negotiating with regional tribes for land cessions to the United States in order to allow sale to American settlers.

After his father died in 1840, the 15-year-old Logan Fontenelle returned from St. Louis to Nebraska, where he began to work as an interpreter for the US Indian Agent at the Bellevue Agency.

Several years later, in August 1846 he acted as an interpreter for Big Elk when he signed an illegal treaty with Brigham Young to allow the Mormon pioneers to create a settlement on Omaha territorial lands.

About this time, LaFlesche and Fontenelle established a ferry across the Platte River near the present-day site of Columbus, Nebraska, to accommodate the increasing migrant traffic.

This town was incorporated March 14, 1855; unfortunately "the good people of Quincey were innocent of correct French pronunciation [Font-nel, ] uttered the name as a three-syllable word, and came down heavily on the second syllable."

[10] In January 1854, 60 Omaha leaders met in council to discuss the treaty; they were reluctant to delegate so important a matter even to their gente chiefs.

The treaty included provision for payments of tribal debts to the traders Fontenelle, Louis Saunsouci, and Peter Sarpy.

[12] The President of the United States, based on recommendations by the US Indian Office (and the agent in the field, who had the most authority in the matter), was to determine the proportions of the annuity to be received in money and in goods.

[12] In 1855 a band of Brulé Sioux killed and scalped Fontenelle and five of his party, who were part of the Omaha summer buffalo hunt, along Beaver Creek in the present-day Olson Nature Preserve in Boone County, Nebraska.

Iron Eyes (Joseph LaFlesche) account of Fontenelle's death states: "Logan could have made a dash like I did, but he laid down in the grass and attempted to fight the Sioux alone.

[15] An eyewitness account of the funeral reports that "a procession...moved slowly along, led by Louis San-so-see [sic], who was driving a team with a wagon, in which, wrapped in blankets and buffalo robes was [Logan Fontenelle.]

On either side the Indian chiefs and braves, mounted on ponies, with the squaws and relatives of the deceased, expressed their grief in mournful outcries.

After putting him in the coffin his [squaws] who witnessed the scene, uttered the most piteous cries, cutting their ankles until the blood ran in streams.

[11] An 1889 sketch of Joseph LaFlesche in the Bancroft Journal said he was the only chief of the Omaha to have had any European blood; as noted, he was adopted as a son by Big Elk, which was the way he fully entered the tribe.

[8] Although A. T. Andreas called Fontenelle the "last great chief" of the Omaha in his 1882 history of Nebraska,[12] the assertion of chieftainship is not supported by the evidence of tribal structure and contemporary views provided in 1919 by Melvin R. Gilmore, curator of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, and by the 20th-century historian Judith Boughter.