Tom Hughes
Sergeant Major
- Joined
- May 27, 2019
- Location
- Mississippi
"How many bullets have you ever found in one hole?" I was asked by a relic hunter years ago.
"Just one", was my reply.
That remained true until 2015, when @alan polk called me over to a hole he'd been digging at a battlefield site where we had shared permission to search for civil war artifacts.
The hole we dug was deep and wide, as we kept pulling bullets from the dirt. I remember we dug almost waist deep as our metal detectors kept giving off readings of more small metal targets. In that hole, we found numerous dropped .69 calibre musket balls as well as buckshot balls. Alan found more than me, but I did manage to recover these 12 balls. For display purposes, I glued the buckshot balls to the main .69 calibre ball as a reconstruction of what the original cartridge would have looked like.
This is an image of what the complete cartridge would've looked like in its paper combustible paper cartridge.
It more than likely was ammunition for the 1842 model conversion musket.
Buck-n-Ball black powder cartridges consisted of a .69 calibre lead ball topped with 3 small buckshot balls to enhance their killing capacity. The paper has obviously deteriorated over time, leaving only the lead balls.
Why would Confederate troops dump their valuable ammunition?
We think that maybe this was an area where Confederate troops surrendered and dumped their ammo enmasse.
We'll never know for sure.
What is obvious is that they emptied their cartridges boxes full of complete ammo, leaving a time capsule of smoothbore ammunition for us to discover 150+ years in the future.
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