T He L osT H isTory
Soldiers
continued from page7
them in 1972.
PHOTO COuRTesy nORTHeRn ROCky HeRITaGe CenTeR
Recreating the Ride
Heroes Wrongly accused
Nine months after completing the trip, the
25th Infantry was shipped out to the
Spanish American War.
“But the bicycle itself, the trip, really uni-
fied the 25th Infantry as well as the Pacific
Northwest because they were really appre-
ciated as colored soldiers,” Doss says.
On the battlefield in Cuba, the squad dis-
tinguished itself as one of the most valuable
units, capturing the Spanish flag in the fight
for El Caney in 1898 and winning the praise
of Col. Teddy Roosevelt.
Eight years later, their glowing reputation
was brutally destroyed.
“Unfortunately, 1906 in Brownsville,
Texas, there was a White citizen that was
shot, they blamed it on the 25th Infantry,
and then President Roosevelt dishonorably
discharged the whole lot of them,” Doss
said.
Roosevelt’s move to fire the 167 soldiers
effectively barred them from any future mil-
itary or civil service jobs. An effort by
Booker T. Washington to intervene ended in
failure.
Years later historian John D. Weaver pub-
lished a book-length investigation of the
Brownsville Affair, as it had come to be
known.
The book prompted a new review by the
U.S. Army which found the soldiers inno-
cent. President Richard M. Nixon pardoned
Now a U.S. Forest Service employee in
the Portland office, Doss has a unique
understanding of the soldiers’ story because
he and nine others recreated their ride in
1974.
“The route that we took was as close as
we could get based on the primary roads
became secondary and tertiary roads and
they ran adjacent to the railroad tracks so
we were probably never more than 5, 10
miles off the original route,” he said.
“We went across the United States,
through the same major cities that they did
on the same calendar dates.”
Doss and fellow Black Studies Professor
Richard Smith organized the ride, traveling
afterward to Minneapolis where they inter-
viewed the sole survivor of the 25th
infantry, Dorsie Willis.
“It was a wonderful time that we had with
him,” Doss says. “He did not take the bicy-
cle trip but his first sergeant Mingo Sanders
did. So we got to hear the story about that as
well as the Spanish American War.”
Doss said he and the others took the
odyssey because they wanted to honor the
25th Infantry – which had sacrificed so
much only to be crushed by racism.
Also, though, the trip was a matter of
principle.
“I belonged to the speakers bureau in the
Black Studies Department and we used to
go out around the state of Montana, and
people would say, ‘well you don’t under-
stand, there were never any coloreds here,
so we don’t know about new people.’
“And so when I found that original photo-
graph of the bike corps outside Fort
Missoula on their bicycles — that ended up
being about a three year research project.
“And we decided to take the trip in their
honor as well as to show the contributions
of African Americans.”
see juMP on page
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February 23, 2011 Black History edition The Portland Skanner Page 7