In the summer of 1897, twenty United States soldiers rolled out of Fort Missoula headed for St. Louis.

On bicycles.

Not motorcycles. Not modern touring bikes with lightweight frames, twenty-seven gears and seats engineered by somebody with strong feelings about lower-back support.

Bicycles.

And because this was the United States Army, naturally they weren’t allowed to just take a nice bicycle ride.

The men carried rifles, ammunition, blankets, shelter tents, food, clothing, cooking gear and military equipment. Their specially built bicycles weighed about 32 pounds empty. Packed for the expedition, they averaged around 59 pounds.

Then Montana supplied rain, mud, cold and snow almost immediately.

Apparently the Army wanted a transportation test and Montana volunteered to handle quality control.

But underneath the oddity of soldiers riding bicycles across the American West was a serious military experiment.

The Army wanted to know whether bicycles could move soldiers quickly, cheaply and reliably across country.

Twenty soldiers of the 25th Infantry were about to find out.

Why Was the Army Experimenting With Bicycles?

A bicycle may not look revolutionary now.

In the 1890s, it was.

Bicycles offered something armies had always wanted: relatively fast individual transportation that did not require feeding, watering or resting a horse.

European militaries were already experimenting with bicycle troops, particularly for reconnaissance and carrying messages. American military officers were paying attention.

At Fort Missoula, Second Lieutenant James A. Moss became one of the idea’s strongest advocates.

The 25th Infantry had already incorporated cycling into physical training, and in 1896 Moss received permission to form an experimental bicycle corps using volunteers from the regiment.

Their job was simple to describe and considerably harder to perform:

Find out whether bicycles actually worked for soldiers in the field.

First, Montana Had a Few Tests of Its Own

Before anybody pointed a bicycle toward Missouri, the soldiers tested them closer to home.

Their first major experimental ride took them from Fort Missoula toward Lake McDonald and back.

Then came a much larger test: an approximately 800-mile expedition from Fort Missoula through Yellowstone National Park and back in 1896.

They rode through conditions that would expose every weakness in the idea.

Mud. Water. Sand. Dust. Rocks. Ruts. Mountain grades. Stream crossings. Rain and snow.

They carried military equipment with them rather than treating the expedition as a recreational ride.

The results were encouraging enough that Moss proposed something much bigger.

Fort Missoula to St. Louis.

Meet the 1897 Bicycle Corps

Forty soldiers volunteered for the long-distance experiment.

Twenty were selected.

Acting First Sergeant Mingo Sanders was the senior enlisted man. William Haynes and Abram Martin led the two squads.

The rest of the enlisted detachment included Elias Johnson, John Findley, George Scott, Hiram L. B. Dingman, Travis Bridges, John Cook, Frank L. Johnson, William Proctor, Elwood Forman, Richard Rout, Eugene Jones, Sam Johnson, William Williamson, Sam Williamson, John H. Wilson, Samuel Reid and Francis Button.

They came from Companies B, F, G and H of the 25th Infantry.

Some were experienced cyclists.

Some weren’t.

According to records assembled by the National Archives, one soldier had learned to ride only about a week before departure.

That fellow deserves a moment of appreciation.

Learning to balance a bicycle and then immediately being told, “Good. Missouri,” feels like the kind of Army planning that has survived several generations.

John Findley: The Man Keeping the Wheels Turning

One soldier brought particularly useful experience to the experiment.

Before joining the Army, Private John Findley had worked at Imperial Bicycle Works in Chicago.

That made him an obvious choice as the corps mechanic.

And a mechanic mattered.

These weren’t bicycles being ridden around a city park.

The machines were going to be pushed, carried and ridden through mud, rocks, sand, railroad grades, stream crossings and whatever else nearly 1,900 miles of 1897 America could throw at them.

Findley carried additional repair equipment and spare parts.

When something broke, there was no support van coming around the corner.

There wasn’t a bicycle shop conveniently waiting five miles down the interstate.

There wasn’t an interstate.

If the machine failed, the soldiers dealt with it.

These Were Not Ordinary Bicycles

The A.G. Spalding Company supplied specially equipped military bicycles for the experiment.

They had steel rims, reinforced spokes and forks, chain-protecting gear cases, brakes, luggage carriers and frame cases designed to hold supplies.

The bicycles weighed about 32 pounds before loading.

Packed for the St. Louis expedition, they averaged roughly 59 pounds.

Each soldier also had military equipment to account for.

The standard load included clothing and personal items, a blanket, shelter equipment, eating utensils and a canteen.

Most carried a Krag-Jorgensen rifle, ammunition and bayonet.

Rations were distributed along the route so the corps generally needed to carry only about two days of food at a time.

That worked beautifully as long as the soldiers reached the next supply point on schedule.

Weather, as Montana residents may have noticed, does not always consult the schedule.

June 14, 1897: Off for St. Louis

The Bicycle Corps left Fort Missoula at about 5:30 in the morning on June 14.

They rode through Missoula in formation and headed east.

Twenty-eight miles later, the experiment started becoming an experiment.

Rain turned the road into thick mud.

The bicycles clogged.

The men pushed them, carried them and repeatedly scraped mud from the wheels.

They finally made camp about 54 miles from Fort Missoula.

Then it rained through the night.

The next day, portions of the wagon road were nearly impassable, forcing the soldiers onto railroad tracks.

And Montana wasn’t finished.

Near the Continental Divide, they encountered sleet and snow.

Imagine pushing a nearly 60-pound loaded bicycle uphill on a rough nineteenth-century road through wet snow while carrying military equipment.

Then imagine remembering you were headed for St. Louis.

Across Montana and Into the Plains

The riders continued east through Montana, generally following railroad corridors when practical.

They passed through communities including Helena, Bozeman, Livingston and Billings before turning southeast.

Sometimes the bicycles attracted as much attention as the soldiers riding them.

Bicycles themselves were still novel enough in many rural places that a military column traveling on them was something worth stopping to see.

But curiosity did not improve the roads.

Mud remained one of their biggest enemies.

At times the sticky ground accumulated around the wheels so badly that riding became impossible.

The men scraped it away, pushed the bikes or moved along railroad tracks where conditions were better.

Mechanical problems came too.

During one difficult stretch in Wyoming, command of the main group temporarily fell to Sergeant Mingo Sanders while Moss went ahead with a smaller group seeking supplies and bicycle parts.

That detail matters.

This expedition wasn’t simply one officer towing twenty men behind him.

It depended on enlisted leadership, mechanics, teamwork and soldiers making decisions when plans went sideways.

And plans went sideways regularly.

Then Came Nebraska

If Montana tested the riders with cold and mud, Nebraska changed the examination.

Now the problem was heat, sand and water.

The sand hills made bicycle riding brutally difficult.

Contemporary accounts describe long stretches where the soldiers had to get off and push.

One later recollection attributed to Private Richard Rout described roughly 185 miles of sand.

Temperatures were reported as extreme, and reliable water became a serious problem.

The men adjusted their schedules around the heat, traveling during cooler parts of the day when they could.

Sometimes they rode by moonlight when road conditions allowed it.

This was no longer really a question of whether a bicycle could move quickly.

It had become a question of whether soldiers could keep the bicycles moving at all.

And they did.

What Exactly Was the Army Testing?

That is the part of this story that can get lost behind the sheer weirdness of the pictures.

These soldiers were gathering information.

How fast could troops move?

What terrain stopped a bicycle?

What equipment could soldiers carry?

How badly did weather affect them?

How often did machines fail?

How difficult were repairs?

What happened to the men physically over long distances?

Could a bicycle unit operate independently in the field?

This was transportation research with rifles.

Every mountain grade, muddy road, broken part and long day was producing information the Army could use.

St. Louis

On July 24, 1897, after about six weeks on the road, the Bicycle Corps reached St. Louis.

Moss’s accounting put the expedition at approximately 1,900 miles.

They had traveled from western Montana across portions of Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Missouri.

They had ridden when the roads allowed it.

They had pushed when they didn’t.

They had dealt with mud, snow, heat, sand, bad water, mechanical problems and nearly every variety of road nineteenth-century America could provide.

And the bicycles had made it.

So had most of the detachment.

The men eventually returned to Fort Missoula by train, and the experimental Bicycle Corps was disbanded.

So…Did the Bicycle Work?

The answer is actually more interesting than a simple yes or no.

The experiment demonstrated that bicycles could move equipped soldiers substantial distances under extremely difficult conditions.

Moss believed the test had established their military usefulness.

The Army did not create a permanent bicycle corps.

Technology was moving very quickly.

Motorized transportation would soon provide military planners with capabilities bicycles couldn’t match. The United States was also heading toward war with Spain in 1898, changing Army priorities.

The bicycle experiment became a fascinating branch of military transportation history that never quite became the trunk.

But that does not make it a failure.

Experiments are supposed to answer questions.

These soldiers answered a lot of them.

The Men Behind the Experiment

There is an important limitation to how we know this story.

The surviving official narrative was largely recorded by officers, particularly James Moss, along with newspaper reporter Edward Boos and other contemporary journalists.

We have Army returns, muster rolls, enlistment records, photographs, reports and newspaper coverage.

What we largely don’t have are extensive first-person diaries or published accounts written by the enlisted riders themselves.

That matters.

It means we can reconstruct where they traveled, what they carried, what happened to the bicycles and many of the conditions they faced.

But we should be careful about pretending we know exactly what each man thought or felt along the way.

Sometimes responsible history means knowing where the record stops.

Still Rolling Through Montana History

More than a century later, the photographs remain remarkable.

Rows of soldiers standing beside bicycles.

Rifles strapped to machines.

Bedrolls packed around handlebars.

Young men preparing to ride from Montana to Missouri at a time when most American roads weren’t paved and motor vehicles were barely beginning to appear.

There is plenty about 1897 that feels impossibly distant now.

But look at those bicycles long enough and the story becomes surprisingly familiar.

Somebody had a new piece of technology.

Somebody else asked whether it could do a job better.

A group of people got handed the equipment and told to go find out.

And twenty soldiers at Fort Missoula climbed onto bicycles and gave the Army an answer the hard way.

One mile at a time.

For more Montana history, strange stories, wild places and the people who made the 406 what it is, visit The406Life.com and follow The 406 Life podcast.

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About our sources: The history of the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps is unusually well documented through U.S. Army records, muster rolls, enlistment papers, Lieutenant James A. Moss’s expedition reports, contemporary newspapers and historical photographs. The Historical Museum at Fort Missoula maintains extensive research files on the Bicycle Corps, and the National Archives and National Park Service have published histories based heavily on these records. Most detailed surviving descriptions of the expedition come from officers and contemporary reporters rather than personal accounts written by the enlisted riders themselves. Where accounts differ or a soldier’s perspective was not preserved, The 406 Life does not fill those gaps with speculation.

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