Bicycle Tramps – 2014 ABNA Entry

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) Entry - this eBook is a sample of the first 3,000-5,000 words; it is not the full book. The ABNA contest is operated on Amazon.com only. Visit this entry on Amazon.com to leave customer feedback. To vote for the Grand Prize winner starting July 8, visit www.amazon.com/ABNA. It’s the Gay Nineties, 1897, and the United States is having a spirited affair with the bicycle and on the verge of war with the Spanish. While Teddy Roosevelt trains with his rough riders on horseback, on a remote wilderness outpost in Montana, the 25th Infantry is mustering African-American “Buffalo Soldiers” into the Bicycle Corps, a detail committed to testing the feasibility of the bicycle as a tool of warfare. The Army is using black troops so, if the experiment fails, they can laugh it off; it does not fail. Bicycle Tramps is the story of what happens next. The novel is narrated by J. Hallertau Leech, a reluctant and incompetent assistant surgeon ordered to accompany Uncle Sam’s Iron Riders, as they were called, on their grueling trek from Fort Missoula to St. Louis, Missouri. What happens in St. Louis with Leech and Zipp McNabb and Miles Littlejohn, two enlisted Buffalo Soldiers, will alter the course of the trio’s lives thereafter as they race across a country caught between peace and the horse, the bicycle and war. An unlikely bond takes hold when these soldiers realize that their survival depends on one another and they end up fleeing to the American West on bicycles. A bit True Grit, a bit Huckleberry Finn, a bit Glory, a lot of Breaking Away, Bicycle Tramps is a literary bicycle western, an argot and a picaro based on true events and authentic, strange cycle-powered steampunk machines.