Wheels Against the Wilderness:

The Buffalo Soldiers Who Rode Bicycles Out of Fort Missoula

Introduction

In the summer of 1897, twenty Black infantrymen pedaled out of a dusty Army post on the edge of the Bitterroot Valley and disappeared over the horizon toward St. Louis, Missouri, nearly two thousand miles away. Accompanied by two white officers and a civilian journalist—making a total party of twenty-three men—they rode not horses, not wagons, but heavy steel-framed bicycles loaded with rifles, rations, and blanket rolls. The expedition, organized by a young lieutenant with more ambition than rank, tested a question the United States Army had been asking with growing seriousness for half a decade: could the bicycle replace the horse as an instrument of war? The soldiers who carried out that test were members of the 25th United States Infantry Regiment, one of the Army's segregated Black regiments, stationed at Fort Missoula in western Montana. Their journey, largely forgotten outside specialist circles until a wave of centennial and quasquicentennial commemorations revived interest in it, offers a window into the intersection of military modernization, racial politics, and the physical geography of the American West at the close of the nineteenth century.

The Twenty-Fifth Infantry at Fort Missoula

The 25th Infantry Regiment traced its origins to the reorganization of the postwar Army under the Congressional Act of 1869, which consolidated the nation's infantry into twenty-five regiments and mandated that two of them be composed of Black enlisted men commanded chiefly by white officers (Bradsher). After service in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and the Dakota Territory, the regiment was transferred to Montana in May 1888, with its headquarters and four companies posted at Fort Missoula, a garrison of roughly thirty buildings established in 1877 along the Bitterroot River a few miles from the young town of Missoula (Bradsher). By the mid-1890s, Missoula had grown into a modest but bustling railroad and lumber town of nearly four thousand residents, and the fort's soldiers were, for the most part, woven into the social life of the community, attending dances and patronizing local businesses even as isolated incidents of prejudice reminded them of the limits of that acceptance (Bradsher).

Into this setting arrived Second Lieutenant James A. Moss, a Louisiana-born West Point graduate who, by his own later admission, had not welcomed his assignment to a segregated regiment but came to respect the men under his command (Bradsher). Moss was also an enthusiastic cyclist at a moment when bicycling had become a genuine national craze, and he found in Fort Missoula's Twenty-Fifth an eager population of riders; a survey that Colonel Andrew S. Burt, the regiment's commander, submitted in 1895 reported that three officers and seventy-eight enlisted men at the post already knew how to ride (Bradsher). That same year, Army leadership itself was reconsidering the bicycle's military value. Major General Nelson A. Miles, who became Commanding General of the Army in October 1895, had for several years pressed for formal trials of the machine, and by the time Moss submitted his own proposal for a Fort Missoula bicycle corps in April 1896, the idea had considerable institutional momentum behind it (Bradsher). Burt endorsed the plan, the A. G. Spalding Company agreed to supply specially built military bicycles at no cost to the government, and on May 12, 1896, the Department of Dakota approved the experiment (Bradsher; "25th Infantry Bicycle Corps").

The 1896 Trial to Yellowstone

Moss selected eight Black enlisted volunteers for an initial test ride, and in August 1896 the small detachment pedaled from Fort Missoula to Yellowstone National Park and back, a round trip of roughly eight hundred miles that took the men over the Continental Divide and through the geyser basins before they returned to the post (Bradsher; "25th Infantry Bicycle Corps"). The soldiers drilled in formation, scaled fences as high as nine feet, forded streams, and covered as much as forty miles a day carrying full equipment, a knapsack, blanket roll, and shelter section strapped to the handlebars of each machine (Fort Missoula Museum). The trial convinced Moss, and apparently his superiors, that a longer and more demanding expedition was worth attempting. Within months he had received authorization to organize a larger corps and to aim it at a far more ambitious target: St. Louis, Missouri.

The Great Bicycle Experiment of 1897

On June 14, 1897, twenty Black enlisted soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry rode out of Fort Missoula bound for St. Louis, a route the Army estimated at somewhere between 1,900 and 2,000 miles depending on the source consulted, a discrepancy that likely reflects rounding and minor variations in the actual road distance traveled rather than any real disagreement about the journey's scale (Bradsher; "Iron Riders"). Moss commanded the expedition; Dr. James M. Kennedy, the post's assistant surgeon, served as second in command; and First Sergeant Mingo Sanders, a thirty-nine-year-old career soldier, held the senior enlisted position, with Lance Corporals William Haynes and Abram Martin leading two subordinate squads ("Bicycles for the Army"). A young reporter for the Daily Missoulian, Edward "Eddie" Boos, accompanied the column to file dispatches, giving the expedition an unusually rich contemporary press record that historians still draw upon (Pediment Publishing; "Bicycles for the Army"). The bicycles themselves weighed roughly 32 pounds empty, but once loaded with Krag-Jørgensen rifles, ammunition, tent sections, extra gear, and rations, each machine weighed anywhere from 59 to nearly 80 pounds, turning every steep incline into a test of brute strength.

The chosen route deliberately followed the corridors of the Northern Pacific and Burlington railroads across Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Missouri, a plan designed to expose the bicycles and their riders to a maximum range of terrain, climate, and road conditions so that the Army could draw broad conclusions about the machine's usefulness (Missouri State Parks). The soldiers struggled almost immediately. Crossing the Continental Divide, they encountered muddy roads and unseasonable snow that slowed their progress to a crawl, and further along the route, in Wyoming, exhaustion and poor visibility during a storm nearly caused a serious accident (Bradsher; Smithsonian Magazine). Descending into the Gallatin Valley, the column followed the Missouri and then the Yellowstone Rivers, passing through Bozeman, where townspeople turned out in numbers to watch the riders pass, and continuing on toward Billings and the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn before crossing into Wyoming (Smithsonian Magazine). Along the Great Plains the men faced a different set of hardships: extreme summer heat, shortages of food and water, and at least one bout of illness attributed to alkaline water, all compounded in places by open hostility from local residents who were unaccustomed to, or unwelcoming of, Black soldiers passing through their towns (Missouri State Parks). Despite this, the column was more often greeted with curiosity and enthusiasm than hostility, drawing crowds in town after town along the way (Bradsher).

After forty-one days on the road, with only six rest days built into the schedule, the Bicycle Corps rode into St. Louis on July 24, 1897, having averaged roughly fifty miles of travel on each riding day (Missouri State Parks). More than ten thousand spectators are reported to have gathered to watch the soldiers arrive at Forest Park, where a local cycling club escorted the column into the city (Bradsher; Smithsonian Magazine). National newspapers, which had taken to calling the venture "The Great Experiment," carried accounts of the men's arrival, and the soldiers themselves picked up nicknames in the press, most durably "Iron Riders," a reference both to the unyielding, single-speed bicycles they rode and to the physical endurance the trip demanded of them (Missouri State Parks).

Moss hoped to extend the experiment further, proposing a subsequent ride from St. Louis to Minneapolis over improved roads before returning to Montana by bicycle as well, but the Army denied permission (Fort Missoula Museum). On August 19, 1897, the men of the Bicycle Corps returned to Fort Missoula by rail, and their borrowed bicycles were shipped back to the Spalding Company (Fort Missoula Museum; "25th Infantry Bicycle Corps"). Moss did not give up on the concept entirely. In February 1898 he requested authorization for a third expedition, this one intended to run from Fort Missoula to San Francisco, and Colonel Burt endorsed the proposal, arguing that it would draw favorable public attention to Black soldiers as they passed through the country (Fort Missoula Museum). By that point, however, the looming war with Spain had shifted the Army's priorities, and further bicycle trials were judged unnecessary (Fort Missoula Museum).

Significance and Legacy

The Bicycle Corps' experiment arrived at a genuinely open question in late-nineteenth-century military planning. Army officers writing in professional journals of the period debated at length whether bicycles could serve usefully as scouts, couriers, or even mounted infantry, and General Miles had already used relay teams of civilian cyclists to carry messages over considerable distances in tests conducted earlier in the decade (Bradsher). Fort Missoula's trials, run under grueling field conditions rather than in controlled circumstances, offered some of the most demanding data the Army had yet gathered on the subject, and participants and observers concluded that a rider on a bicycle could indeed outpace cavalry and infantry alike at a fraction of the cost, since the machine required no feed, no water, and comparatively little maintenance (Pediment Publishing). At the same time, the experience underscored a converging national problem: the country's road network, particularly outside the eastern seaboard, was simply not built for sustained long-distance travel by any wheeled vehicle, a point that Miles himself had made in public remarks tying military bicycle trials to the broader case for road improvement (Bradsher).

The racial dimension of the expedition is inseparable from its military one. The soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry served in a regiment whose men were, in the words of one Army inspector who reviewed the unit in 1895, disciplined, orderly, and among the best kept commands he had observed, yet they continued to operate within an Army and a country that assumed Black soldiers had something to prove that white soldiers did not (Bradsher; Langellier). Historian John P. Langellier, writing in Montana The Magazine of Western History, situates the Fort Missoula garrison within the broader history of Black military service in the northern Rockies, where African Americans remained a small population even as buffalo soldier regiments brought a modest but meaningful increase in their numbers to the territory beginning in the late 1880s (Langellier). The Bicycle Corps' widely covered, generally well-received arrival in St. Louis, and the national press attention the expedition generated, gave these soldiers a rare public platform on which their competence and endurance were displayed to an audience well beyond Montana.

The Army ultimately shelved further bicycle experimentation once war with Spain intervened, and the machine gun and, later, the motor vehicle rendered the bicycle-mounted infantryman a historical curiosity rather than a military fixture. Lieutenant Moss went on to a long career, eventually commanding the 367th Infantry Regiment, a Black unit of the 92nd Infantry Division, during the First World War, a continuation of the working relationship he had first formed with Black soldiers at Fort Missoula two decades earlier (Bradsher). The bicycles themselves were returned to their manufacturer and the men dispersed back into ordinary garrison duty, but their journey survived in newspaper archives, in the photographic record held today by the University of Montana's Mansfield Library, and in the renewed public commemorations that marked the ride's centennial and quasquicentennial anniversaries in Missoula and along the old route (Pediment Publishing; Missouri State Parks).

Conclusion

The 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps occupies a modest but genuine place in the history of American military innovation and in the history of Fort Missoula itself. It was, in its own moment, a serious and closely watched test of new technology, conducted under the kind of punishing field conditions that no laboratory trial could replicate. It was also, unavoidably, an episode in the long and uneven story of Black military service in the American West, carried out by men who were required, again and again, to demonstrate abilities that white soldiers were simply presumed to possess. That the two threads, technological experimentation and racial proof, were so tightly braided together in a single bicycle ride across five states says a good deal about the Army, and the country, that sent the Iron Riders on their way.

Works Cited

Bradsher, Greg. "Iron Riders – The 25th Infantry Regiment Bicycle Corps, Part I." Rediscovering Black History, National Archives, 7 Feb. 2022, https://rediscovering-black-history.blogs.archives.gov/2022/02/07/iron-riders-25th-infantry-regiment-part-i/. Accessed 12 Sept. 2026.

"Bicycles for the Army: The 25th Infantry in Montana." Montana History Portal, Montana Memory Project, https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/90296. Accessed 12 Sept. 2026.

"Iron Riders: The Story of the 25th Infantry Regiment Bicycle Corps." Missouri State Parks, https://mostateparks.com/ironriders. Accessed 12 Sept. 2026.

Langellier, John P. "Buffalo Soldiers in Big Sky Country, 1888-1898." Montana The Magazine of Western History, vol. 67, no. 3, Autumn 2017, pp. 41-58. Montana Historical Society, https://mhs.mt.gov/pubs/magazine/DigitalIssueSum2020/MMWHAut2017_Langellier.pdf. Accessed 12 Sept. 2026.

Pediment Publishing. "Lieutenant Moss and the Cycling 25th Infantry at Fort Missoula." Pediment Publishing, https://www.pediment.com/blogs/news/lt-moss-and-the-25th-infantry-at-fort-missoula. Accessed 12 Sept. 2026.

"25th Infantry Bicycle Corps." Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, https://fortmissoulamuseum.org/exhibit/25th-infantry-bicycle-corps/. Accessed 12 Sept. 2026.

Smithsonian Magazine. "The Black Buffalo Soldiers Who Biked Across the American West." Smithsonian Magazine, 14 July 2022, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-black-buffalo-soldiers-who-biked-across-the-american-west-180980246/. Accessed 12 Sept. 2026.