Fort Missoula and the Iron Riders

Fort Missoula was built in a hurry in the summer of eighteen seventy-seven, with two companies of the Seventh Infantry arriving on June twenty-fifth to construct a post for protecting settlers in western Montana from the Nez Perce conflict then raging in Idaho. Construction had barely begun when the company commander, Captain Charles Rawn, was ordered to block the Nez Perce from entering Montana through Lolo Canyon. That didn't go particularly well, as Fort Fizzle a few miles back on your route can attest.

But the fort's more surprising chapter came two decades later. Beginning in eighteen eighty-eight, Fort Missoula became home to four companies of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, one of the Army's four segregated Black regiments known as Buffalo Soldiers. Two hundred twenty African American soldiers arrived from the Dakota Territory that summer.

In eighteen ninety-six, Second Lieutenant James Moss proposed an experiment: could bicycle-mounted infantry move more efficiently than foot soldiers across rough terrain? The Army approved the idea and the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Bicycle Corps was born. Moss put his men through training rides of increasing distance, reaching Yellowstone and back, eight hundred miles, in eighteen ninety-six.

Then came the great test. On June fourteenth, eighteen ninety-seven, twenty Black enlisted men, Moss, an Army physician, and a newspaper reporter set out from Fort Missoula on bicycles loaded with full field gear. They rode nearly nineteen hundred miles across Montana, Wyoming, and the Great Plains to Saint Louis, Missouri. They called it the Great Experiment. After forty-one days, pedaling through mud, heat, and rough roads, all but three completed the journey. The men were greeted as heroes at each town along the route and given a formal reception in Saint Louis.

The Army ultimately decided the bicycle was not practical for field warfare, and the experiment ended. But the Twenty-Fifth Infantry went on to serve in Cuba during the Spanish-American War the following year. Fort Missoula today is a museum on the western edge of the city.