The Liesenburg served as a ferry in the Panama Canal area under Army control, and then was sold to a firm which ran the vessel on the Surinam river in South America.

Following the loss of the nearly-new but wooden steamship Clallam in 1904, Joshua Green, president of the Puget Sound Navigation Company, owner of the Clallam and the dominant Puget Sound shipping concern, announced that the company would replace its wooden steamships with ones built of steel.

Two oil-fired boilers produced steam at 250 pounds pressure, with whole power plant developing 1,400 horsepower (1,000 kW).

Originally Sioux was intended to be placed on the route from Seattle to Irondale, where an important ironworks had been established, and which had provided much of the steel for the construction of the vessel.

[1] Sioux was later placed on the Hood Canal route, running with the sternwheeler State of Washington for the rest of the summer of 1911.

[1] When the Lake Washington Ship Canal was completed, the Sioux was the first commercial vessel to pass through the locks during the opening ceremony on July 4, 1917.

[1] The destruction showed the vulnerability of wooden-hulled steamers, one of the reasons why the Puget Sound Navigation Company switched to steel-hulled vessels.

Olympic had been scheduled to depart on Friday the 13th, but company management felt this supposedly ill-omened date would create too much adverse comment, and postponed the departure by one day.

[4] In 1941, the U.S. Army bought Olympic from the Puget Sound Navigation Company and rebuilt her for service in the Panama Canal area as the Franklin R. Leisenburg.