Combat· Late 19th Century Foreign Interventions
Panama / Aspinwall Expedition
The largest Marine landing of the late nineteenth century before the war with Spain.
Early in 1885 a major insurrection convulsed the Panama isthmus, then a province of Colombia, threatening the railroad and the transit on which so much American commerce depended. A Marine battalion under Major Charles Heywood was landed at Aspinwall, the Atlantic terminus also called Colon, and at Panama City, to protect the railroad and American interests and to keep the transit open through the disorder. The battalion held its charge for several months until order was restored, and no casualties resulted from the deployment. The expedition was a significant milestone for Heywood, who would become the ninth Commandant of the Corps a few years later, and it was a forerunner of the far larger interventions in the same region that would come in the Banana Wars, when Panama and the canal would draw the Marines back again and again.
Record no. 475