Logan Fontenelle, an interpreter and Omaha chief, was born at Bellevue in May, 1825. His father was Lucien Fontenelle, a noted fur trader both on the lower Missouri River and near Fort Laramie, Wyoming. His mother was a daughter of Big Elk, noted chief of the OMaha. Logan, the eldest of four sons and one daughter, was educated at a private school near St. Louis, before joining the family at Fort Laramie in 1837. Two years later the family returned to Bellevue, where the father soon died.
Little is known of Logan's life for the next decade, but in the early 1850's he became recognized as a chief of the Omaha by both the tribe and the U. S. government. As both chief and interpreter he went with the Omaha chiefs to Washington, D.C. where they signed a treaty on March 16, 1854, selling most of their land to the government and restricting themselves to a reservation in northeast Nebraska. This opened the Nebraska Territory to settlement.
In 1855, Logan Fontenelle accompanied a party of Omaha on a buffalo hunt near here in present Boone County. The party was attacked by Sioux and Logan was killed, probably on July 17th. His body was returned to Bellevue, where he was buried.
]]>For more than ten thousand years the Beaver Valley and surrounding prairie, with their abundant water and wildlife, nurtured Native Americans. The Pawnee Indians, whose permanent earthlodge villages were a few miles to the south, claimed this area for hunting, fishing, and trapping.
On August 14, 1871, A. T. Coquillard, president of the St. Edward Land and Immigration Company of South Bend, Indiana, purchased 320 acres from the Union Pacific Railroad. A townsite called "Beaver City" was surveyed, but remained mostly undeveloped as settlement slowed during the grasshopper plagues of the mid-1870s. Beaver post office was established in 1872 at the sod house of Capt. Robert Hardy, one of the first settlers. In 1874 the post office was moved to the west side of Beaver Creek and the settlement was renamed Waterville.
The building of a grist mill in 1876-77 attracted settlers and businesses. The present townsite was platted and named St. Edward in honor of Rev. Edward Sorin, founder of Notre Dame University. St. Edward was incorporated October 6, 1884. It is the only town so named in the United States.
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