[4] Following a post-commissioning visit to her namesake city, Tacoma, Washington, the protected cruiser voyaged to Hawaii in April and May.

On 8 July, Tacoma departed Cherbourg to escort the remains, aboard USS Brooklyn (CA-3), to their final resting place at Annapolis, Maryland.

There, they first met the Russian commissioners for the peace negotiations which were later held at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and resulted in the termination of the Russo-Japanese War.

Tacoma returned to Philadelphia on the 8th and conducted training for the Pennsylvania and Massachusetts naval militias before rejoining the North Atlantic Fleet for operations in the Caribbean Sea.

She returned to the West Indies again in the spring of 1908 for stops at St. Thomas, St. Christopher, Martinique, Margarita Island, Port Mochima, Cunamá, La Guaira, and Curaçao.

In January 1911, pursuant to the orders of the senior naval officer present embarked in the gunboat Marietta, Tacoma prevented the converted yacht Hornet from participating in an insurrection against the government financed by U.S. banana baron Samuel Zemurray.

Later that month, she landed a force of marines at Puerto Cortés, Honduras, to protect American banana companies.

The cruiser patrolled almost incessantly off the Nicaraguan coast at Bluefields and at Great Corn Island from 3 August to 25 October.

In November, she headed – via Tampico, Mexico, and Galveston, Texas – for the Navy Yard at Boston where she remained through mid-February 1913.

[4] Tacoma resumed operations in Mexican waters early in May in the wake of the Tampico Incident and the resultant seizure of the customs house at Vera Cruz.

The warship cruised the Mexican coast through September during the latter stages of the Huerta-Carranza struggle and while the new Carranza government consolidated its power against former allies, notably Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.

[4] Late in September 1914, Tacoma departed the Mexican coast; steamed, via Jamaica and Cuba, to Haiti, and patrolled off Cape Haitien until early December.

As a unit of the Special Service Squadron, which was ordered to observe events in Latin America and the Caribbean and to protect American interests in those areas, Tacoma patrolled the isthmian coast until January 1924.