Americas Black West, part 2

But rounding up homeless Cree and protecting white settlers wasn't the African-American soldiers only function. Some of them in 1896, as members of the 25th Infantry, tried out a new means of transportation for the army. For a while they rode bicycles. After peddling out of Fort Missoula, Montana, ten days later they reached Yellowstone National Park, having traveled about six miles per hour over roads that were more akin to trails and trails that just about didn't exist. Then in June of the following year they started off again, eastward. Their destination this time was to go all the way to-St. Louis! It wasn't an easy task, and they endured heat, hunger, thirst, and bad weather along with a lot of other near unendurable conditions. But endure they did and on July 24 they reached St. Louis. The men were a success and the experiment was considered a success. What failed were the American roads, or better put, the lack of them.

But in spite of bad roads, worse leaders and their causes, the African American troops can honorably claim that eleven of their members earned the Congressional Medal of Honor while fighting the western Indians.

BLACK COWBOYS

While the Black soldiers were out soldiering in the west the Black Cowboys were riding and roping and doing their part to settle the land. And they were having just as much fun and getting into just as much trouble as any other cowboy of the era. In fact, the Black Cowboys were doing up wild and woolly Dodge City, Kansas long before the Earps did in the Clantons. The first man shot in that lawless burg was a Black cowboy who went by the name of Tex. Now, it seems, that Tex was an innocent bystander who was merely observing two other cowpokes, and incidentally white cowpokes, fight.