Fort Missoula and the Iron Riders

The fort south of town was built in a hurry. Two companies of the Seventh Infantry arrived in late June of eighteen seventy-seven as reports came in from Idaho of the Nez Perce conflict already unfolding. The U.S. Army needed a post in the Missoula valley, and they needed it immediately. The fort was laid out on a bench above the river, and within a generation it had grown into something more permanent: officers' quarters, a parade ground, a hospital, and barracks capable of housing several hundred soldiers.

By the eighteen nineties, the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Regiment had arrived at Fort Missoula. They were one of the original Buffalo Soldier regiments, all Black enlisted men commanded by white officers, and in eighteen ninety-six and eighteen ninety-seven, a young second lieutenant named James Moss had an unusual idea. Moss wanted to know whether military units could be moved efficiently by bicycle. He petitioned the Army for permission to find out.

On June fourteenth, eighteen ninety-seven, twenty Black soldiers and three white men, Moss, an Army physician, and a newspaper reporter named Edward Boos, rolled out of Fort Missoula at five thirty in the morning. They were carrying Krag-Jorgenson rifles, fifty rounds each, and enough gear to sustain themselves across open terrain. Their destination was St. Louis, Missouri. They covered the one thousand nine hundred miles in about forty days, arriving on July twenty-fourth.

The reporter Boos filed dispatches the entire way, and newspapers across the country published them. The Iron Riders, as the regiment became known, proved that soldiers could move by bicycle over rough roads and difficult weather, but the Army never pursued bicycle infantry as a doctrine, and the experiment became a footnote. For the regiment, Fort Missoula remained a posting they occupied with distinction. For the fort, it remains one of the most remembered chapters of its history: twenty men on bicycles, rolling east out of the mountains into a country that mostly did not know what to make of them.