America's First Motorcycle

At noon on Saturday, June first, nineteen oh one, a small crowd gathered on Cross Street in downtown Springfield to watch something that had never happened before in America. A motorized bicycle, chain drive, one and three quarter horsepower single-cylinder engine, a diamond frame sourced from a bicycle shop, made its first public run down the street. The machine was the creation of Oscar Hedstrom, a mechanic of extraordinary precision, and George Hendee, a former champion bicycle racer who had been manufacturing cycles in Springfield since the eighteen nineties.

They called it the Indian. The name was Hendee's choice, aimed at evoking something native and American and untameable. In nineteen oh three, Hedstrom rode an Indian to a world speed record of fifty-six miles per hour.

In nineteen oh four, the company introduced the deep red that would become its trademark color. By the early nineteen tens, Hendee Manufacturing, still officially the company name until nineteen twenty-three, was the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world. For nearly two decades, Springfield was the center of the global motorcycle industry.

The Indian survived two world wars and the Depression, outlasted dozens of competitors, and produced beloved models like the Scout and the Chief. The company went bankrupt in nineteen fifty-three, after a series of ownership changes and engineering decisions that longtime riders found hard to forgive. Its death was mourned like that of a person.

The Indian name and the legacy of those Cross Street runs lived on through revivals, lawsuits, and eventually a genuine resurrection. What started on a Saturday afternoon in Springfield became the oldest American motorcycle brand in continuous memory.