Logan Fontenelle is the interpreter at the…
1854 CE
The mixed-race Omaha-French man is bilingual and also works as a trader.
His mother was Omaha; his father French Canadian.
In January 1854 he acts as interpreter during the agent James M. Gatewood's negotiations for land cessions with sixty Omaha leaders and elders, who sit in council at Bellevue.
Gatewood has been under pressure by Washington headquarters to achieve a land sale.
The Omaha elders refuse to delegate the negotiations to their gens chiefs, but come to an agreement to sell most of their remaining lands west of the Missouri to the United States.
Competing interests may be shown by the draft treaty containing provisions for payment of tribal debts to the traders Fontenelle, Peter Sarpy, and Louis Saunsouci.
The chiefs at council agree to move from the Bellevue Agency further north, finally choosing the Blackbird Hills, essentially the current reservation in Thurston County, Nebraska.
The sixty men designate seven chiefs to go to Washington, DC for final negotiations along with Gatewood, with Fontenelle to serve as their interpreter.
The chief Iron Eye (Joseph LaFlesche) is among the seven who go to Washington and is considered the last chief of the Omaha under their traditional system.
Logan Fontenelle will serve as their interpreter, and whites will mistakenly believe he is a chief.
Because his father was white, the Omaha never accept him as a member of the tribe, but consider him white.
Although the draft treaty authorizes the seven chiefs to make only "slight alterations," the government officials will force major changes when they meet, taking out the payments to the traders and reducing the total value of annuities from $1,200,000 to $84,000, to be spread over the years until 1895.
It reserves the right to decide on distribution between cash and goods for the annuities.
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