An Army On Bicycles

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as bicycles became more reliable and easier to ride, various Western countries experimented with using the new device as a military tool. Italy was the first, putting crack sharpshooters on wheels in 1870. By 1887 the French Army had soldier cyclists; it later developed a folding bicycle weighing only twenty-five pounds that could be carried in a backpack. Cyclist sections were formed among British volunteer forces in 1888; by 1894 they numbered 5,100, with a planned increase to 20,000. The United States, in keeping with its customary post-Civil War inattention to the military, did not include bicycles in the country’s defense scheme until 1891, with a forty-man National Guard unit in Connecticut.

To a young West Point graduate named James A. Moss, this conservative effort was not enough. He had a powerful urge to prove that bicycles could be valuable to the U.S. Army. Lieutenant Moss was stationed at Fort Missoula in Montana, where his chief duties consisted of fighting Indians. His enthusiasm for bicycles was based on their many advantages over horses.

Bicycles were cheaper, did not eat, and required little care. They made almost no noise and were less conspicuous. They raised little dust, and unlike a horse’s hoofprints, a wheel track would not betray its direction. Bicycles needed no caretakers to stay with them, thus freeing more soldiers for the battlefield. And on adequate roads cycles were surprisingly faster than horses. When there was a greater need for speed than numbers, as in the taking and holding of passes, bridges, or other strategic places, wheelmen could be very valuable.

Moss conceded the horse’s superiority under some conditions, including bad roads and rainy weather. And of course bicycles could never replace horses in the cavalry’s main function—the charge. Still, while the Army had experimented with using bicyclists to carry messages, Moss noted that there had been very little effort to apply them to troop movement. He was eager to give the idea a try, and in 1896 he managed to secure the support of Gen. Nelson A. Miles, commander in chief of the Army.

General Miles, an avid wheelman himself, had been involved with some of the Army’s first bicycle experiments. In one, begun on May 18, 1892, he sent a message from his headquarters in Chicago to Gen. O. O. Howard in New York. Through heavy rains, bicycle relays covered the 975 miles in four days and thirteen hours. Moss referred to General Miles as “The Patron of Military Cycling” for these efforts and for his recommendation that the Army maintain a regiment of cycle infantry at Fort Missoula. On this authority the 25th U.S. Infantry Bicycle Corps was organized in July 1896 under the command of Lieutenant Moss.

Besides Moss, the original corps consisted of a sergeant, a corporal, a musician (to play reveille, taps, and so forth), and five privates, among them a cycle mechanic. After the corps was established, Moss began holding daily practice rides of fifteen to forty miles and exercises involving fence climbing and stream crossing. Soon the men could ford three-foot-deep streams and scale nine-foot fences with little difficulty.

A round trip to Lake McDonald in the nearby Mission Mountains presented the first major challenge for the 25th Infantry wheelmen. Although a violent rainstorm impeded their progress, the men managed to cover the 126 miles in twenty-four hours of actual pedaling. General Miles was impressed and gave the go-ahead for a trip to Yellowstone Park.

On that exercise the corps again proved its mettle, covering the 791-mile ride in only 126 traveling hours- an average of six and a quarter miles per hour, despite bad roads and the eighty-pound weight of the laden bicycles. Of all the physical hardships, wind proved to be the worst. Moss noted that even when conditions did not allow pedaling, foot travel was easier than usual because men could wheel their packs instead of carrying them.

In view of these successes and others, General Miles recommended to Secretary of War Daniel S. Lamont that Moss be allowed to lead his troops on a twenty-eight-hundred-mile roundtrip to St. Louis the following summer. St. Louis was chosen as the destination to provide the most severe test possible, with a broad variety of altitudes, climates, and road conditions, including the rocky roads of Montana, the sand roads of Nebraska, and the clay roads of Missouri.

For the St. Louis expedition the corps increased in size to include a surgeon, an additional corporal, and eleven more privates. Their average age was twenty-seven, and except for the surgeon and Moss, all the men were black. A Daily Missoulian reporter, Edwin H. Boos, accompanied the corps on its journey. His reports were sent to newspapers across the country. The Spalding Company furnished chain-driven bicycles specially outfitted to Moss’s specifications with extra-heavy forks and crowns, gear cases, steel rims, tandem spokes, and streamlined storage areas.

The corps left Fort Missoula at 5:40 A.M. on Sunday, June 14, 1897. Boos reported: “They presented a pleasing picture and their progress will be watched with interest from one end of the nation to the other.” The men indeed looked sharp in their canvas knickerbocker trousers, blue gingham shirts, and campaign hats. Rifles slung across their backs and gleaming white bike packs completed the spectacle.

The first day’s ride gave a good sample of their impending trials. A violent afternoon thundershower turned the roads to gumbo, choking the corps’s wheels with mud. Alternately riding and carrying the bicycles, the men spent much time scraping off the goo. Still, they managed to chalk up a respectable fifty-four and a half miles the first day. This tenacity stayed with the men over the entire journey—and they would need it.

The corps reached the Continental Divide on the fourth day, just as a terrible sleet storm set in. Boos reported: “The snow was so thick that we could not see twenty feet in front of us and the air very cold and icy. Our ears and finger tips were numb, but there was no alternative. We had to go on and on we went.” Several times over the course of the trip local citizens gave inaccurate descriptions of the road conditions ahead. Before the corps reached Bozeman, Montana, for example, poor information guided them onto a blind trail, which ended in a marshy field filled with mosquitoes.

Through constant rain, over steep, rock-strewn roads, the cyclists rode from Bozeman to Billings, Montana. One unforeseen hazard was the local populace, which, besides being less than trustworthy about the surrounding geography, was sometimes contemptuous of wheelmen, especially black ones. Near Billings three women in a wagon laughed derisively at the corps and refused to let it pass. Lieutenant Moss, unamused, seized a brief opportunity and charged the corps on by, so astonishing the women that they forgot to mind their spooked horses, which sped off into the rough.

Fort Custer, Montana, was the goal after Billings. As the men crossed the Crow Indian reservation, barren, lonely country confronted them, along with the everpresent sheets of rain. Riding became impossible. Moss wrote of this stretch: “About 8 o’clock the bark of a dog indicated that we were not the only human beings in those God-forsaken hills.” At Fort Custer the men received a warm welcome, although the great mosquito swarms caused one soldier to comment it was probably insects and not Indians that had killed the man for whom the fort was named.

The corps was glad to leave the drenching rains of Montana, but the ninety-mile ride from Fort Custer to Sheridan, Wyoming, included very rough and hilly roads and seven crossings of the Little Bighorn River. They were fortunate enough to miss a violent hailstorm that had recently passed through the area, but not the eightfoot drifts it had left behind.

The corps reached Gillette, Wyoming, on June 29 at 2:00 P.M. , after very little sleep and a twenty-mile uphill grind under a merciless sun. “Many of the men were so tired they fell asleep while eating,” Boos wrote. Beyond Gillette the next station with water was Moorcroft, thirty miles away. Lieutenant Moss, told that the roads were very good, roused the tired men late in the afternoon for what he assumed would be an easy four-hour ride. At seven o’clock, however, great clouds gathered. The darkness made the corps slow down, and soon afterward a broken axle forced them to dismount and walk their bikes.

Moss turned the corps over to the acting first sergeant and struck out ahead with three men and provisions, intending to have supper ready at Moorcroft for the rest. At about 12:30 A.M. Moss’s group met with three others from the main body who had lost their way. “I was so tired and sleepy,” Moss wrote later, “that the horizon appeared like a clothesline just about to strike me above the eyes. Three or four times I threw my hand out at this imaginary clothesline—I was really sleeping on my feet.” The corps finally reached Moorcroft at 6:00 A.M. and slept soundly, having been awake for forty-five hours.

Riding over pricklypear cactus, the wheelmen made it to South Dakota, where they drank alkali water, the worst they had yet encountered. Later on they came across sandy roads, foreshadowing the most difficult terrain of the odyssey, the sand hills of Nebraska.

Only an hour or two after hitting the hot sand hills near Alliance, Nebraska, Lieutenant Moss was incapacitated by the effects of the alkali water. During the next four days the troops were under the command of the surgeon, J. M. Kennedy, while Moss traveled to the next stop by train. The ankledeep sand of the wagon trail made even bumpy railroad ties look attractive, and they followed the line of the Union Pacific Railroad for the entire 170-mile sandhill stretch, riding under an intense sun in temperatures of one hundred degrees.

At the midpoint of the sand hills, on July 7, half the corps was sick and two men had developed terrible blisters on their feet from the searing sand. Boos was assigned the difficult job of determining which men were truly sick and which were acting the part to earn a rest. Remarkably, though, the ailing group covered this 170-mile oven in four and a half days, an average of 38 miles per day. Conditions improved by the time the men reached Lincoln, Nebraska. The sand hills were gone, and the end of the trip was in sight. The shimmering prospect of Missouri’s clay roads lay ahead.

Despite more rain, and roads that turned out to be worse than expected, Missouri was easy after the heat, bad water, and sand of Nebraska. However, the citizens of Missouri were sometimes less than pleased with black soldiers on bicycles, wearing uniforms that many still associated with the Civil War-era Union Army, pedaling across their fields. Coming upon one farmhouse, Boos approached the owner to inquire about camping nearby. The farmer replied by telling them to “pile right offa this land,” while his wife sarcastically offered the space below the pigsty.

Adding to the hostility of the local citizens, the corps experienced its first casualty at St. Joseph, Missouri. A private, claiming to be ill and unable to continue, was sent back to Fort Missoula. Of this incident Moss remarked (despite his own earlier incapacity): “I have every reason to believe this soldier was merely feigning illness thinking I would send him the rest of the way to St. Louis by rail. As he had given me trouble on several occasions, I thought it best for the public service to send him back to his station.”

All the pain and discomfort the corps had endured began to disappear when the men crossed the Missouri River at St. Charles, where a small delegation of wheelmen from St. Louis heartily greeted them. The ecstatic corps rode into St. Louis at 6:00 P.M. on July 24 to cheers from large groups of wheelmen and citizens.

The St. Louis Republic ran a frontpage story reading in part: “When Lt. Moss and his men dismounted amid the cheers of the waiting wheelmen, they did so with the knowledge that they had accomplished the greatest military bicycle feat ever proposed on this continent. In importance, the successful termination of the trip is almost beyond comprehension. It can mean no less than the ultimate adoption by the war department of bicycles as an adjunct to the fighting equipment of the army, and permanent establishment of bicycle corps in every post in the country.” However, the story also noted that no officers from the Army were present to welcome them.

This absence proved to be significant. Lieutenant Moss had planned a return trip by bicycle to Fort Missoula, and even envisioned a future coast-to-coast experiment. But to Moss’s dismay the corps was ordered to return to its station by rail, despite high praise from General Miles. While the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps had shown that troops could travel by bicycle, the Army evidently decided that the difficulties involved were too great.

Lieutenant Moss never saw his cherished dream fulfilled. The corps was disbanded on April 10, 1898, and the Army experimented very little with bicycles after that. Poor roads, the vast size of the country, a large supply of horses, and a heavy bias toward railroads all worked against the bicycle as a method of troop movement. (In Europe, however, particularly France, conditions were opposite, and Moss’s experiments encouraged the establishment of similar units.) Shortly after the turn of the century motorcycles and automobiles became widely available, dealing the final blow to military bicycling in the United States.