Canteen Half

[Stonewall_Greyfox]

Re: Canteen Half

I think my post was confusing. I was not disputing the practice of using canteen halves and the multifunctionality of them. My only point was that I think many of our "brothers" in the hobby today over-represent the use of the canteen half. You know it's like everyone carrying a Springfield, just because it's easier to clean....sure it's documented, but what about the range of other weapons. I think we have proven that the canteen half was a valuable accoutrement to those that had them...but I feel some of us need to stick in a proper mess and have a man carry a skillet, and/or have some people use plates/or share...or use tin cups and muckets...I know we want some degree of uniformity...but I think what we all want is authenticity...and that means we need a certain degree of diversity. More food for thought, although the practice of personalizing gear was all too common, the "destruction" of issued property was indeed a crime in at least the federal army and although on the wide scale not many people were punished for it. There were some officers in both armies who were stricklers for the rules...Anyways, just some more food for thought...

Paul B. Boulden Jr.

RAH VA MIL '04

[marlin teat]

Re: Canteen Half

I agree that personal cooking is probably over represented but that is likely due to the fact that we, ironically, have less transportation than 140 years ago. We seldom have the luxury of packing mess equipment on the wagons and therefore have to lug it ourselves. Perhaps this is just another one of those things that authentics have adopted to set us apart from heavy campers and we need to reevaluate it in regard to living history camp scenarios.

Jim Ogden and Lee White have done a lot of research on the subject and this is what thay have to say:

NPS Confederate Uniform Guidelines
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park

LIVING HISTORY GUIDELINES THE CONFEDERATE INFANTRY IMPRESSION ……

Camp Equipage:
Each soldier should carry a period tin cup, knife, fork, spoon, and tin plate. More extensive cooking items such as period individual frying pans (even improvised ones from old canteens) are not necessary and should be very limited. Cooking during the Campaign for Chattanooga was done in messes (four or five to fifteen men) sharing the cooking duties and using large cooking utensils such as kettles, camp kettles, frying pans, coffee pots, dutch ovens, large spoons and forks, butcher knives, mess pans, wooden water buckets, axes, etc. These large items were carried in the regimental baggage wagons which accompanied the troops except in the presence of the enemy. They were often packed in wooden boxes serving as mess chests. When the soldiers were issued rations (normally in three to five day increments), the baggage wagons with the cooking utensils were present except on rare occasions. In some units, the soldiers assigned to the wagon trains did the cooking and the rations were delivered cooked to the troops in the ranks. This practice became standardized during the Atlanta Campaign.

[Company Tailor]

Re: Canteen Half

Take this for what it's worth...

On one of my adventures overseas with the Army on enterprising individual had the brianstorm of rigging up a field expedient shower by taking an issue plastic canteen and punching about a million holes into it and duct taping it to the end of a hose. It made a beautiful hand held showerhead that would blast the sand and muck out of the nastiest scalp. Plus, if you could get enough water pressure it was like a toy at a water park, but I digress. The idea caught on and spread. Soon every platoon in the company and every company in the battalion had thier own shower area in base camp. Well, the battalion S4 caught wind of it and started issuing statements of charges for destruction of government property to all the offenders who had destroyed their canteens.

My point is, if the half canteen frying pan thing was done, my gut, unscholarly, undocumented opinion is that anyone who wrecked a canteen in this manner would not have wanted to advertise the fact to every passing officer who would be perfectly happy to make their life miserable for destroying government property. Hide the thing in your haversack.

Cheers!

[Vuhginyuh]

Re: Canteen Half

I agree that personal cooking is probably over represented but that is likely due to the fact that we, ironically, have less transportation than 140 years ago. We seldom have the luxury of packing mess equipment on the wagons and therefore have to lug it ourselves. Perhaps this is just another one of those things that authentics have adopted to set us apart from heavy campers and we need to reevaluate it in regard to living history camp scenarios.

Jim Ogden and Lee White have done a lot of research on the subject and this is what thay have to say:

NPS Confederate Uniform Guidelines
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park

LIVING HISTORY GUIDELINES THE CONFEDERATE INFANTRY IMPRESSION ……

Camp Equipage:
Each soldier should carry a period tin cup, knife, fork, spoon, and tin plate. More extensive cooking items such as period individual frying pans (even improvised ones from old canteens) are not necessary and should be very limited. Cooking during the Campaign for Chattanooga was done in messes (four or five to fifteen men) sharing the cooking duties and using large cooking utensils such as kettles, camp kettles, frying pans, coffee pots, dutch ovens, large spoons and forks, butcher knives, mess pans, wooden water buckets, axes, etc. These large items were carried in the regimental baggage wagons which accompanied the troops except in the presence of the enemy. They were often packed in wooden boxes serving as mess chests. When the soldiers were issued rations (normally in three to five day increments), the baggage wagons with the cooking utensils were present except on rare occasions. In some units, the soldiers assigned to the wagon trains did the cooking and the rations were delivered cooked to the troops in the ranks. This practice became standardized during the Atlanta Campaign.

I COULD NOT AGREE MORE.
This was posted earlier in Camp Of Instruction (and partially in responce to ''how to handle hot cookingware''?).

Re: Proper soldiers skillet "spider" etc.- post#23

One thing not discussed in this thread is the ''mess'' theory.
The heart of this is: Share the food, Share the duties at the fire, Share the weight.

... any soldier used to cooking on coals adjacent to an open fire or hearth should have more heat tolerance than we do.

[Vuhginyuh]

Re: Canteen Half

Is it just me or does anybody else think that posts like these are much more important than those debating blockade runner cargo or movie reviews?
Sorry to break the string, but sometimes the simple things make the most difference.

I have learned something reading these...

[va-yank]

Re: Canteen Half

Take this for what it's worth...
My point is, if the half canteen frying pan thing was done, my gut, unscholarly, undocumented opinion is that anyone who wrecked a canteen in this manner would not have wanted to advertise the fact to every passing officer who would be perfectly happy to make their life miserable for destroying government property. Hide the thing in your haversack.

Cheers!

Patrick,

Great point. From then to now human nature and the nature of military authority has probably not changed much. My guess is that plenty of canteens got burned up in fires while these fellas sat in camp for months at a time, and officers didn't like it, when they were made aware of it. They were the ones who got stuck doing paperwork for stuff that got broken and misappropriated.

Your carriage and bearing in and out of the ranks is in a way a commentary on the officers in charge of you. If you want to advertise not so much that you are a modern mainstreamer, but that your first person command structure is lax, then strap that canteen half on your exterior, or [fill in the blank].

[Jimmayo]

Re: Canteen Half

Perhaps the first post in this thread should have specified Union use of canteen halves. Pity the CS soldier who tried to melt the two halves of his Gardner canteen apart.

I have seen a tin drum canteen made into a flour sifter. If you will look at the Stanley Phillips Exavacuated Artifacts books you can see lots of stuff that the early relic hunters picked up in camps, including a canteen half with a wire handle.

[Johan Steele]

Re: Canteen Half

I think you guys are missing a point here. It wasn't too difficult to pick up a canteen from the battlefield or from a comrade who died or was discharged for disease. That's how I can see the aquisition of spare canteens as not only logical but as even probable. An earlier poster mentioned turning a canteen into a shower head; it's still done as a field expediant, especially when you can buy a canteen on the cheap at any local Army Navy store, pawn shops or the local clothing sales. Now I know none of these existed in the Civil War but I can certainly see spare canteens, not to mention battlefield aquisitions, floating around and there have always been ingenious GI's.

I've read enough evidence to know canteen halves being used as plates & skillets was far from unknown but at the same time I don't think it was increadibly common, to the point of a couple in a Company not being out of line. If it was tied to a canteen hanging from a mans shoulder and noone was missing canteens; well then, what would an officer have to complain about? It wouldn't look pretty, but then again noone looks pretty after a couple days of route marching. And if it was time for an inspection and your officer was a stickler, you could easily remove the canteen half from your haversack or from it's position on your canteen in a couple seconds and then reattach it after the regulation hound was gone on to other pastures.

As it is my father has in his possesion a canteen that went to the Sea w/ one of Sherman's men. It isn't your typical bullseye or smoothside, in fact it doesn't look like a canteen at all but more like a tin map case. It holds about two pints and has a handy cup that closes and seals it. In other words uniformity and regulation appearance went by the wayside in preference to performance, especially among the western troops. Men used plenty of gear they weren't issued.

I'm not saying every re-enactor should have a canteen half hanging from his canteen, far from it in fact. I may pull mine off after this discussion and put it back in my haversack... but to tell the truth it's a whole lot more convenient to hang it from my canteen.

[coffee boiler]

Re: Canteen Half

Why they didn't hang the canteen half on their canteens....

There is probably a good reason why they didn't hang the halves from their canteens. This is just a guess, but one reason might be that when the guys came back from water detail they might not have spent much time trying to find "their" canteen, they probably just grabbed one from the pile and kept on matching. If you hang your half on your canteen, you might run the risk of loosing your plate.

[58 lorenz]

Re: Canteen Half

Wilbur Hinman,in "Corporal Si Klegg and his Pard" goes into great detail about the uses of the canteen,and how canteens were obtained for making into frypans:"When a lot of them became battered and leaky,and the company commander wanted to drop them from his monthly return of government property for which he was responsible,he would have them duly condemned by a board of officers appointed to hold a solemn inquest upon them. These regulation forms having been complied with,the old canteens were eagerly sought after by the soldiers,who were now at liberty to make such use of them as their ingenuity might suggest."
...."the soldier found himself in possesion of two tin basins 8 or 10 inches across and in the center about 2 inches deep. One of these he carried day after day in his haversack. It was not so often that the latter was so full of provisions that there was not plenty of room for it. Its weight was nothing,and he found it useful in ways that the man who made it never thought of".
Hinman goes on to mention how it was used as a wash basin,a coffee roaster, pancake frypan,corn grater,and even an emergency entrenching tool. There is a very nice drawing accompanying this section of the book.
Doug Price

[Possum Skinner]

Re: Canteen Half

An interesting note.
I found yet another reference to the canteen half business in the memoirs of Confederate Officer, Albert T. Goodloe, 1st Lt., Company D, 35th Alabama Infantry. It is called Confederate Echoes .

"Among our cooking utensils mention must be made of the frying pans that we made by bursting open Yankee canteens, which we would hold over the fire by slipping the edge of the canteen into the split end of a stick, which served as a handle. These cantens were made of two concave-convex tin plates, fastened together around their edges, and which could easily be blown apart by putting a little powder in them and igniting it. We would only destroy the canteen as such when it began to leak, for we needed all the canteens we could get for carrying water, and then we would use the side that did not leak for a frying pan. This utensil was especially adapted for making cush in out of our bread when it was too old to be good eating otherwise; and our cush was so palatable at times that we would declare that we were going to live on cush altogether when we got home from the war."

Now Goodloe here was in the Western theater for his entire tenure, so I wonder how often they got their hands on these canteens. Also, I thought it was interesting to note that he also says they used gunpowder to blow them apart. As I recall, several people dismissed that as a myth back on the old board. Yet, here is another man, writing his memoir in 1893, and he also mentions this practice. I like others, do not see how they ignited the powder to do anything other than fizzle unless they packed it in something.

[Robert Braun]

Re: Canteen Half

Mr. Thomas wrote:

Now Goodloe here was in the Western theater for his entire tenure, so I wonder how often they got their hands on these canteens. Also, I thought it was interesting to note that he also says they used gunpowder to blow them apart. As I recall, several people dismissed that as a myth back on the old board. Yet, here is another man, writing his memoir in 1893, and he also mentions this practice. I like others, do not see how they ignited the powder to do anything other than fizzle unless they packed it in something.

Dismissed it as a myth, eh? On what basis?

It would have been a simple matter to blow apart the canteen, due to its ability to hold the charge once exploded, allowing the pressure to rupture the soldered seams. A fuze of sorts could easily be fasioned from a simple twist of paper containing some grains of gunpowder.

I think I would have been simpler to toss the thing into the fire and wait for the solder in the seams to melt off. May Lt. Goodloe didn't want to wait for that to happen (??)

Regards, Bob.

[hireddutchcutthroat]

Re: Canteen Half

On the Red River camapaign back in 1994, one of my pards found a worn out US canteen that the retreating Confederates had left behind. We decided that we should make a set of plates out of the old canteen, so when we started our evening meal we stuck the canteen in the fire with about 10 rounds inside of it and blasted the sucker apart. I still carry that same canteen half and the 1st person expirence to this day.

[Moonshine]

Re: Canteen Half

YOU FOUND IT!!! WOW!!! That's like finding a needle in a haystack of needles. Was there moonshine still in it? Did you find the haversack too?

I guess it's too late to ask for it back then???

Jim Ross

[hireddutchcutthroat]

Re: Canteen Half

:D

Sorry we drank all the moonshine and ate the haversack. I just remembered that I tossed my old tin plate that I had into the woods, I wonder if some relic hunter has sold it on Ebay.