Long before space force or bike force, the DC militia became the first one in the country to create a bicycle corps as part of its militia.
In 1888, shortly after he was placed in charge of the District's militia, General Albert Ordway began looking into ways that the militia could use bicycles. He started a company but there weren't enough "safety bicycles" around at the time to fill the group out. By 1891 however, Ordway was ready to form the first separate and distinct bicycle corps as a branch of a militia in the United States.
In 1892, he started to promote the idea of bicycle corps nationwide, while the military was taking efforts to study the use of the bicycle in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. That spring he published, with the help of the Pope Manufacturing Company (which just happened to produce a "Soldier's Standard Bicycle" model of their Columbia Light Roadster), a book on Cycle Infantry Drill Regulations. In it, the owner of Pope argued that if we'd just had the safety bicycle, and a network of good paved roads, the British would have never burned the Capital.
Content includes charts showing various drill formations, several pages of musical notations for trumpet calls, etc.
The same year he had the Washington Military Cyclists participate in a relay to Pittsburgh and in 1895 organized a messenger relay to New York City to prove the value of the bicycle to those in the military that were skeptical. Unfortunately, they were shortly thereafter disbanded due to a high level of defections.
(Source: "A Militia Bicycle Corps"; Washington Evening Star; Dec 16, 1891; Page 10)
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