Fort Missoula

Fort Missoula was established in eighteen seventy-seven during tensions with the Nez Perce, and it went on to play a remarkable range of roles in American history. In eighteen ninety-seven the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Bicycle Corps, an all-Black unit based here, pedaled about nineteen hundred miles from Missoula to Saint Louis to test whether bicycles could replace horses in the field. During the nineteen thirties the fort housed Civilian Conservation Corps workers who built trails across western Montana.

And in World War Two it served as a detention center for Italian merchant seamen and, later, for Italian and Japanese civilian internees. Today the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula preserves those layered histories on the original grounds.