The community functioned.

People from different nations found ways to live alongside each other.

The experiment was not perfect — there were tensions, disputes, the ordinary frictions of any community — but it worked well enough to sustain a significant population for several years.

American officials, Harrison foremost among them, watched Prophetstown with increasing alarm.

A functioning multi-tribal community on the Wabash was not simply a threat to specific treaties.

It was a demonstration that the political idea behind the confederacy was viable — that Native peoples from different nations could actually work together in the way Tecumseh proposed.