Kekionga remained a central site for the Miami for several decades; their other villages were more temporary. The large meeting house hosted official tribal councils. However, a smallpox epidemic struck Kekionga in 1733 and people evacuated the village for a year. In a speech at the Treaty of Greenville (1795), Little Turtle called Kekionga "that glorious gate ... through which all the good words of our chiefs had to pass from the north to the south, and from the east to the west."