Built by William Cramp & Sons, Philadelphia, USS McCulloch commissioned 12 December 1897 as a cruising cutter of the Revenue Cutter Service, Capt. D. B. Hogsdon, RCS, in command. As the Spanish American War was about to commence, the new cutter was steaming via the Suez Canal and the Far East to her first station at San Francisco. Upon her arrival in Singapore on 8 April 1898, two full weeks before war was declared, orders directed McCulloch to report to Commodore Dewey on the Asiatic station.