To folks not familiar with the village of Missoula, Montana, or of the United States army post aptly named Fort Missoula located about four miles southwest of town, the sight which presented itself during the early morning of June 14, 1897, might have seemed strange indeed. Looking down a dirt road toward the fort, one would have observed twenty-three men riding bicycles and commanded by Second Lieutenant James Alfred Moss, an 1894 graduate of the US Military Academy.
Moss's followers consisted of Assistant Surgeon James Madison Kennedy and Edward H. Boos, a reporter for the Daily Missoulian, along with one sergeant, two lance corporals, one musician, and sixteen privates. All the cyclists except Boos were members of the army's 25th Infantry Regiment ,which had been stationed at Fort Missoula since 1888.
Except for the officers, all members of the 25th Infantry, as well as those of the 24th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments, were black. The units were organized following the Civil War and during the early years, many of their soldiers came from the ranks of freed slaves.
With the rapid expansion of the trans-Mississippi River region and the appearance of tens of thousands of Americans looking westward for their fortunes and their futures, the men of these four regiments, collectively called by the Indians "Buffalo Soldiers," primarily provided protection from hostile natives.
In later years, after the Indian encounters had passed, the Buffalo Soldiers went on to serve in the brief 1898 Spanish-American War in Cuba, saw action in the Philippine Insurrection of 1899-1902, and rode with General John "Black Jack" Pershing (his moniker dates to his early days as a commander of Buffalo soldiers) on his pursuit of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa in 1916.
Although a stranger to the Missoula area might have been surprised at the parade of bicycles being ridden along the village's streets by black troops that late spring day in 1897, the scene was totally understood and appreciated by the town's residents since they had come to know and respect the many Buffalo Soldiers who had been their neighbors for nearly a decade.
What the townspeople witnessed that morning was the culmination of several months of intensive planning and preparation by the officers and men of the 25th Infantry, an experiment first suggested by Lieutenant Moss some months earlier. Bicycles had been around for several decades, but only recently had they caught on back East as a popular mode of transportation.
In early 1896, Lieutenant Moss, who believed that bicycles might offer tremendous transportation support to the military, proposed to his commander Colonel Andrew Burt an idea to experiment with the two-wheelers to determine if they could successfully replace equines as the primary mode for transporting men and materiel.
Burt approved the idea and passed it up the chain of command until it reached the desk of Major-General Nelson Miles, for whom Miles City, Montana is named. Miles -- who after observing a week-long bicycle competition in New York City several years earlier, had predicted that, "The bicycle will in the future prove to be a most valuable auxiliary in military operations" -- quickly approved Moss's request.
Following General Miles's blessing, Lieutenant Moss contacted the A. G. Spaulding Company and negotiated to have Spaulding bicycles, specially designed with his input, donated to the army. He then hurriedly set about recruiting potential cyclists from his ranks and conducting rigorous training. He assembled supplies and equipment and organized a series of mini-journeys that would thoroughly test man and machine, while building up the physical strength of the cyclists as well as developing their mental attitudes, attributes which could stand between them and success.
The first experiment began on August 6, 1896, when Lieutenant Moss and six men of his command left Fort Missoula for a 126-mile, journey northward to Lake McDonald and back. The riders distributed the common items among them -- coffee, sugar, bacon, flour, canned beans, and other food items, as well as bicycle parts and tools. Each man was responsible for his shelter half, personal bed roll, cooking and eating gear, rifle and ammunition, clean clothes, and personal hygiene belongings.
Four days later, the group of tired, wet, and dirty -- but not disheartened -- soldiers returned to their post. Anything that could have happened on the journey did happen -- flat tires, muddy roads, broken chains, fog, and multiple cycle repairs -- causing Lieutenant Moss to bemoan that "had the devil himself conspired against us we would have had but little more to contend with."
Precious little time was given to the soldiers to clean their gear, make repairs and/or modifications to their bicycles, and psych themselves up for another training tour, this time a much longer and tougher trip to the not-yet twenty-five-year-old Yellowstone National Park and back, a journey that would ultimately cover nearly 800 miles.
When Lieutenant Moss and his eight men departed Fort Missoula early on the morning of August 15, they had discarded some of their earlier equipment and replaced it with more bicycle parts, essential medical supplies, additional types of food, and -- thankfully for future generations -- a camera and several rolls of film with which Moss graphically documented the trip.
Since the purpose of these training exercises was to subject the men and the bicycles to the grueling contrasts of terrain, altitude, precipitation, and temperatures, Yellowstone provided the perfect place. Despite episodes of horrible weather, more-horrible roads, and long days of riding and, in some cases, walking their bikes, the men of the bicycle corps arrived back at Fort Missoula on September 8, in good health and excellent humor. Lieutenant Moss declared that everyone was "delighted with the trip -- treated royally everywhere -- thought the sights grand."
For several months following the Yellowstone experiment, Moss continued pursuing his mission to obtain approval to organize a permanent bicycle corps. Although he felt positive about the results of the Lake McDonald and Yellowstone National Park journeys, he wanted to prove once and for all to the army brass that his idea was a good one.
Accordingly, he planned one more mission that would be extremely difficult on both the men and the bicycles and one that would travel through a much-more varied landscape and in more diverse temperature zones than the previous two. He would lead his men from Fort Missoula to St. Louis, Missouri, nearly 2,000 miles away.
The warm days of summer rapidly approached as logistics planning was completed and the supplies and equipment were gathered and checked. All was ready on June 14, 1897, and the men of Fort Missoula's bicycle corps began their long journey into the unknown. With happy and proud residents of Missoula waving and cheering frantically as the cyclists passed on parade, they must have wondered how this important, yet difficult and dangerous experiment would end.
Like the two previous excursions, the long trek to St. Louis was extremely challenging, but those earlier trips proved to be a lifesaver since many of the obstacles encountered had already been faced and successfully addressed.
The journey passed through five states: Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Missouri. The total time on the road was 41 days, and the exact distance traveled was 1900.2 miles, an average of 46.34 miles per day.
After resting at St. Louis, Lieutenant Moss had planned that the corps proceed to Minneapolis for yet another test before returning to Fort Missoula via rail, but his request was denied and the men rode the train from St. Louis back to their post, arriving there on August 19.
The advent of the gasoline engine, and subsequently the automobile, soon captured Army officials' imagination. Before long, although bicycles were used to a small degree in the Great War (to become known as World War I), gasoline- driven vehicles caught on and quickly became important adjuncts to the transportation aspects of combat. By then, the brief era of experimentation with the bicycle for use in the movement of troops was over.
