Let’s Talk Honestly About Fort Missoula & Buffalo Soldiers
Rose-tinted myths and an Over-Emphasis of the Bicycle Corps Come at a Cost
We can learn as much about ourselves from the stories we tell of the past as we can from the primary sources found in archival research. Both in journalism and scholarly research, the writer always has a stake in the story they’re telling. Whatever is written must satisfy our sense of obligation to ourselves, the subjects of our writing and our audience. To pretend otherwise is to perpetuate the lie that any historical or journalistic writing can be objective.
The Missoulian’s special Bicentennial edition published on July 2, 1976 is illuminating in this regard. The impressively large feature covered the history of the area — highlighting notable people, events and interesting stories of the Missoula and Bitterroot Valleys — from before White settlement to the spring of 1976. It’s a good compendium of Missoula history and, as is often the case with such editions, can tell you as much from what it doesn’t cover as from what it does.
One passage in particular caught my eye in a segment about Fort Missoula soldiers and their sometimes raucous adventures downtown. It was merely a passing aside, but revealed so much of what people wanted to believe about the fort. The comment was made while recounting the details of an article from 1902 which quoted a Fort Missoula Sergeant:
“The loquacious sergeant said his men come to town to spend their money, an admirable pursuit as far as Missoula merchants were concerned for that is why Missoula asked for the fort in the first place and why they named it ‘the million-dollar fort.’” (Emphasis added.)
This gets two things wrong in one sentence. Fort Missoula got the nickname of the “million-dollar fort” after Montana Senator and Missoula resident Joseph M Dixon was able to secure funding for renovating the military post, building concrete barracks and upgrading the facilities between 1908 and 1912.
More notably, however, is the fact that Fort Missoula was built by request of its residents, not to boost the local economy (though it did that), but because White settlers wanted the protection of the United States Military. The Army’s presence provided security from possible attacks from the Salish and Nez Percé whose lands settlers were illegitimately occupying. These soldiers policed the Flathead Reservation’s border and also facilitated the forced deportation of Métis-Chippewa Indians to Canada in 1896.
To acknowledge this uncomfortable reality at a time of patriotic pride over the 200th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence would probably undermine the purpose of the special edition and likely sour the mood of its readers.
Removing the White Veneer of History
We must not let the underlying forms of power at play — that of White supremacy and the ever-expanding needs of American capitalism — escape our scrutiny as we grapple with this history.
The process of historical forgetting or distorted re-telling is not always as overt and sloppy as that passage from the Missoulian’s Bicentennial Edition. But the white-centric history we tell of this land often leads us to obscure or de-emphasize realities that speak to hard truths about the nature of our town and this settler colonial project we call the United States.
Fort Missoula is something of a nexus of hard truths of White supremacy from its origin of protecting White settlement here in the wake of the duplicitous negotiations surrounding the Hellgate Treaty to the forced internment of Japanese during World War II.
That it was also the home for a time of two regiments of the segregated 24th and 25th Army infantry units — Black enlisted men popularly known as Buffalo Soldiers — has its own baggage. Here, the issue is one peculiar to the history of Black Americans in the interior West. Their presence is, at best, distorted and fragmented and, at worst, erased from public memory or used in service of placating myths.
The term itself — “Buffalo Soldiers” — sometimes plays into this mythologizing. Many histories about the name of these soldiers refer to an unproven and unlikely origin story that comes close to creating a sense of kinship between these agents of American expansionism and the sovereign indigenous nations they were fighting, brutalizing and policing.
The origin of the term is not known. Romanticized western historical narratives, however, often repeat the claim that the Plains Indians referred to them that way as an indication of respect for their fighting prowess. More likely, the term was used because many soldiers in the late 19th Century wore Buffalo coats to keep them warm in the cold winters on the Plains.
In a strong critique of the mythology of Buffalo Soldiers, American Indian journalist and founding publisher of American Indian Source, Roy Cook, convincingly demonstrates that just examining the context of the times makes a sympathetic rendering of the term difficult to believe.
Military historian Frank Schubert who has written extensively on Black soldiers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, traced the origin of the myth to William Leckie’s 1967 book The Buffalo Soldiers. In it, the author uses an illogical supposition — that the Plains Indians regarded buffalo as sacred and thus would not “so name an enemy if respect were lacking” — to popularize this rose-tinted view.
Schubert points out that the soldiers themselves were never known to use the term at the time. And many employed the same disparaging language of Native people — even incorporating racial slurs used against them — as their White counterparts.
Yet this myth persists. Just look at the Montana Memory Project’s virtual exhibit on Fort Missoula’s 25th Infantry. While acknowledging the fact that the origin is unknown, they repeat the fable using unsourced “speculation” that gives the myth a protective sheen of legitimacy.
It is unhelpful to regard Buffalo Soldiers as unheralded heroes admired by indigenous people, downplaying their participation in wide-spread native genocide. It’s equally misleading to create a spurious unity between two oppressed groups with significantly different, albeit intertwined, histories.
Yet, it’s also important not to overstate the agency Black soldiers had in choosing to join the United States Army to conquer and displace indigenous people across the West.
In the wake of the Civil War, the United States government abandoned providing material support — land, money or resources — to the four million Black Americans liberated from enslavement in 1865. By the mid-1870’s, Black Americans choices were few and getting fewer. Many found themselves mired in poverty in a slightly less oppressive form of slavery as sharecroppers, directly dependent on their abusive relationship with White plantation owners. They also had little to no legal protections and were subject to violent suppression through lynching or forced into chain gang labor through debt peonage. An escape from the ever-tightening noose of Jim Crow to a certain degree of respect and relative freedom as soldiers in the United States Army had to be an appealing option.
We must not let the underlying forms of power at play — that of White supremacy and the ever-expanding needs of American capitalism — escape our scrutiny as we grapple with this history.
The Cost of Over Emphasizing the Iron Riders
Much of the attention given to the 25th Infantry at Fort Missoula is focused on the incredible accomplishment of the famed Bicycle Corp (often called “Iron Riders”). In 1897, a group of Black soldiers commanded by White officers, trekked from Missoula to St Louis, MO on bicycle, experimenting with an alternative mode of cross-country transportation for the Army.
Their well-publicized journey captured the attention of many at the time and their story has been written about at length. The Historical Museum at Fort Missoula features the journey prominently in their exhibits. Montana Public Broadcasting also has an hour-long documentary on the famous excursion.
And this coming June, a week-long celebration of the Iron Riders as part of the quasquicentennial anniversary of their journey is planned with events at Wallace, ID and at Fort Missoula. Complete with a re-enactment ride of the 1,900 mile journey, a golf tournament, a special Missoula city band performance and a Juneteenth celebration, the week promises to bring the Iron Riders histories to the fore of Missoula’s attention this summer.
Yet for all the intriguing details of this unusual story, the enormous attention serves to overshadow the greater historical significance of the 25th Infantry and Fort Missoula in general.
In his book, Black Montana — Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877–1930, historian Anthony Wood observes: “Albeit an entertaining and fascinating piece of western and outdoor recreational history, a fixation on Montana’s Black bicycle soldiers somewhat obscures their role as federal agents forcing tribes onto reservations across the state and then patrolling their borders.”
A stark demonstration of this can be found in the summer of 1896. Less than a month before Lieutenant James Moss took his Iron Riders on their first well-publicized practice run in August, hundreds of Métis-Chippewa Indians were being rounded up, held in detention at Fort Missoula and then forcibly marched out of town at the hands of US military soldiers. The clippings below describes in uncomfortable terminology the scenes of this brutal action:
The central players of the capture, detention and forced expulsion of the Métis were 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers commanded by Lieutenant John Pershing; Troop D had been stationed just outside of Fort Missoula overseeing the operation. Soldiers rounded up Métis Indians throughout the Missoula area for the prior few weeks, confining them until their marched departure on July 22nd. Several men from the 25th Infantry at Fort Missoula were assigned to assist as well. Deportations of the Métis-Chippewa Indians in the rest of the state mostly used rail transportation. Missoula was one of the few where they were forced to leave the state on foot because the Army had run out of funds — first marching to Great Falls and then to Canada.
There do not appear to be any photos of these chilling sights in the Missoula area on July 21st and 22nd, 1896 nor are there any notable historical exhibits in town that I’m aware of detailing this shameful event. But a photo of Moss’s Bicycle Corps soldiers at Yellowstone just a few weeks later is a ubiquitous historical image, highlighting a much different event just a few weeks later.
It would be hard to argue that the policing, capturing and expulsion of indigenous people in this area is LESS significant than that of the accomplishments of the Iron Riders. Yet the bicycle corps receives a disproportionate amount of recognition by comparison.
The Bicycle Corps history is so over-emphasized that it also prevents a fuller understanding of the 25th Infantry’s role as highly visible members of the community. The Iron Riders made up around 19 Black enlisted men whereas the 25th Infantry battalion stationed at Fort Missoula as a whole at that time averaged about 275 Black soldiers, according to military records. The 25th Infantry were at Fort Missoula for 10 years. The Bicycle Corps’ journey was a little over a month.
We can admire and revel in the details of the Iron Riders cross-country trek. There is no question that it was an unprecedented journey and an impressive accomplishment, the details of which are genuinely fascinating. But there is a cost of over-emphasizing and narrowly focusing our attention on one small aspect of Missoula history.
For one thing, it impedes a better understanding of the impact Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Missoula had on Missoula’s early Black population as a whole. Almost 30% of Missoula’s Black population in 1910 were made up of 24th and 25th Infantry veterans and their family members. Several of these former soldiers and family members played a significant role in the creation of St Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church — a deeply important institution for Black Missoulians for almost three decades. Knowing this history allows us to raise the question of what happened to this potentially vibrant Black population in Missoula. Why didn’t it bear fruit over the coming decades, particularly during the Great Migration when millions of Black people left the brutality of the Jim Crow South?
For another, it overshadows the brutal significance of Fort Missoula on Native people. Every day in this state, they fight for self-determination, recognition of their sovereignty and returning stolen land. The struggles they face are the direct result of this history.
And, unlike a novel trip by US Army soldiers traveling across the country on bicycles, that history has not yet been fully reckoned with or faced honestly. We have to do better.
SOURCES NOT DIRECTLY CITED ABOVE:
“Rowdy Days,” Missoulian, Bicentennial Edition, July 2, 1976, p.60-A
Jones, Tate. Images of America: Fort Missoula, p. 8–9
Cook, Roy. “Plains Indian View of the ‘Buffalo’ Soldier,” American Indian Source:http://americanindiansource.com/buffalo%20soldiers/buffalosoldiers.html
Schubert, Frank. “The Myth of the Buffalo Soldiers,” BlackPast, Dec. 19, 2009; https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/myth-buffalo-soldiers/
Wood, Anthony. Black Montana — Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877–1930, p.55
Burt, Larry. “Nowhere Left to Go: Montana’s Crees, Métis, Chippewas and the Creation of Rocky Boy’s Reservation,” Great Plains Quarterly, Summer 1987, p. 202.
1910 United States Federal Census, Missoula County, Montana
