French trade and diplomacy thrived from 1683 through 1691 along the Illinois River at Fort Saint Louis, which once encompassed the top of the sandstone butte later known as Starved Rock. French explorer Robert Renee Cavalier Sieur de La Salle noticed the sandstone butte known today as Starved Rock on his first expedition into the region in 1680. La Salle's second in command Henry Tonti constructed Fort St. Louis with the help of about 20 men in the winter of 1683. The fort supplied a strategic line of communication between the Great Lakes Region and the Mississippi River Valley, and supported a successful trade enterprise between the French and surrounding Native American tribes. In 1683, La Salle and Tonti convinced the Illinois to return to the Illinois Valley and persuaded several other tribes to relocate in the Starved Rock area, a collection of tribes historians often call La Salle's Colony. Trade included furs from beaver and bison for European goods such as metal pots, guns, knives and wool blankets. A warehouse, a chapel, and several cabins enclosed by a 15-foot-high fence known as a palisade, complete with wooden block houses called redoubts, dominated the highest point along this section of the river and served as a military outpost and epicenter for trade in the Illinois Country for the next 8 years. Resources eventually dwindled, the fort was abandoned, and a new fort was built near present day Peoria. The French named the fort Saint Louis after Saint Louis the IX of France, and La Salle's Colony stretched from the Kankakee River to present day Bureau County.