The close of the Indian wars in 1859 saw a quite well-organised steamer service between Portland and The Dalles, and the great rush into the upper country was just beginning. The _Senorita_, the _Belle_, and the _Multnomah_, under the management of Benjamin Stark, were on the run from Portland to the Cascades. A rival steamer, the _Mountain Buck_, owned by Ruckle and Olmstead, was on the same route. These steamers connected with boats on the Cascades-Dalles section by means of portages five miles long around the rapids. There was a portage on each side of the River. That on the north side was operated by Bradford & Company, and their steamers were the _Hassalo_ and the _Mary_. Ruckle and Olmstead owned the portage on the south side of the River, and their steamer was the _Wasco_. Sharp competition arose between the Bradford and Stark interests on one side and Ruckle and Olmstead on the other. The Stark Company was known as the Columbia River Navigation Company, and the rival was the Oregon Transportation Company. J. C. Ainsworth now joined the Stark party with the _Carrie Ladd_. So efficient did this reinforcement prove to be that the Transportation Company proposed to them a combination. This was effected in April, 1859, and the new organisation became known as the Union Transportation Company. This was soon found to be too loose a consolidation to accomplish the desired ends, and the parties interested set about a new combination to embrace all the steamboat men from Celilo to Astoria. The result was the formation of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, which came into legal existence on December 20, 1860. Its stock in steamboats, sailboats, wharf-boats, and miscellaneous property was stated at $172,500. Such was the genesis of the "O. S. N. Co." In a valuable article by Irene Lincoln Poppleton in the _Oregon Historical Quarterly_ for September, 1908, to which we here make acknowledgments, it is said that no assessment was ever levied on the stock of this company, but that from the proceeds of the business the management expended in gold nearly three million dollars in developing their property, besides paying to the stockholders in dividends over two million and a half dollars. Never perhaps was there such a record of money-making on such a capitalisation. The source of the enormous business of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company was the rush into Idaho, Montana, and Eastern Oregon and Washington by the miners, cowboys, speculators, and adventurers of the early sixties. The up-river country, as described more at length in another chapter, wakened suddenly from the lethargy of centuries, and the wilderness teemed with life. That was the great steamboat age. Money flowed in streams. Fortunes were made and lost in a day.