The Lewis and Clark Expedition helped expand interest in the Pacific Northwest. Although seaborne traders had been engaged in the fur trade along the coastline for many years, Lewis and Clark's news and descriptions of the region spurred others in the United States to seek fortunes in the fur trade business in Oregon Country. The first Americans to return were members of John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company as part of an expedition that established Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River in 1811. However, some of the first British traders overland include members of the North West Company that crossed the Rocky Mountains in 1808 and traveled down what they named the Fraser River in modern British Columbia. The fur trade envisioned by the American Pacific Fur Company and put into practice by the North West Company, and later Hudson's Bay Company, was a triangular trade that sent furs to China, Chinese goods such as tea to England, and manufactured goods to the Pacific Northwest for trade with the Native Americans.