At the beginning of the 19th century, the fur industry dominated the Northwest, but much of the interior of the western United States remained unknown beyond the Lewis and Clark expedition, a situation that frustrated Pacific Fur Company owner John Jacob Astor. Seeking to expand his fur empire, Astor sent companies of men known as Astorians to scout a route between Astoria, Oregon and St. Louis, and in 1811 he appointed Wilson Price Hunt to lead an overland expedition. After leaving the Missouri River, Hunt’s party traveled more than 2,000 miles westward in seven months. Although they had planned to follow the northern route of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Hunt turned south across northern Wyoming to avoid the Blackfeet. The party entered Wyoming in August, and on the 18th, still in eastern Wyoming, Hunt wrote of leaving the mountains, turning back toward broken country, climbing nearby slopes, seeing distant mountains with white spots that they took to be the snow-covered Big Horn Range, and buffalo herds running below the peaks. After losing one man and many supplies while trying to navigate the Snake River in Idaho, the Astorians finally reached the Pacific Coast in February 1812.