Black Soldiers Biked Across the West in 1897. He Followed Their Every Pedal Stroke.

Erick Cedeño is an explorer and historian who learns and teaches about history by biking through it. Known as the Bicycle Nomad, Cedeño has retraced many historic routes, including the Underground Railroad route from New Orleans to Niagara Falls.

“I was always fascinated by the resilience of people traveling through the Underground Railroad, not knowing how to read a map, but knowing how to navigate through rivers, mountains, and the natural world,” he told me. “And that’s how they escaped to freedom because there were things that were passed down that—if you follow this river, if you look for this mountain or the North Star.”

Another project of the Bicycle Nomad is still underway. After he discovered a historic photo of the 1897 Bicycle Corps, a subset of the Buffalo Soldiers, Cedeño wanted to know more. The Buffalo Soldiers were the first all-Black regiments in the Army, who, among many duties, served as some of the first caretakers of our national parks. Cedeño biked 1,900 miles to retrace the route that the men traveled in 1897. And he has since begun identifying the 20 soldiers in the photo he found and meeting with their descendants when he can.

“If that was my great-grandfather, I’d want the world to know how awesome he was,” Cedeño said. “Potentially, there’s somebody out there that doesn’t know how awesome their great-grandfather was. These are pioneers, outdoor pioneers.”

So far, six years into his project, he has identified nine of the twenty in the Buffalo Soldiers Bicycle Corps.

We caught up with Cedeño after his panel at our parent company’s festival, Outside Days, to ask him more about his Bicycle Corps project.