✅ SOLVED Opinion on a CW bullet

[Pointman]

This past Saturday I found this bullet. I found it at a location where a house had been removed. The top couple of inches of soil had been scrapped so we were able to get deeper. The entire area was occupied by the Union army for two months after they captured Little Rock and before they started their travels south. The same area another detectorist had found numerous .58 caliber drops and musket balls.

What I was wondering about is this a chewed bullet? It is a little strange because the possible teeth marks are only one side of the bullet and not on both sides. Also what caliber/bullet is it?

Size wise, this is what I am able to come up with:

.900 long
.500 dia
.316 grains

The first and second picture shows both sides of the bullet to illustrate how strange it is.

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[TheCannonballGuy]

That is what we relic diggers call a "fire-melted" bullet. The side with the indentions was laying on the ground when the bullet got hot enough to become partially molten, causing that side to the shape of the ground it was on. That's also why there's some black ash fused onto the bullet's surface. I'm certain about your find because I've dug many-many firemelted bullets in civil war campsite firepits here in the Richmond-to-Fredericksburg area of Virginia. Unfortunately I've never shot any photos of them, so I'm having to use my local relic-digger friend (and T-Net member) Parsonwalker's photo of one he found (below).

Your bullet got a bit hotter than the firemelted one in the photo below, causing any body-grooves that may have been on yours to melt away.

If you were to turn over the one in the photo, its underside would look a lot like the underside of yours.

I can understand why you thought it might be a chewed bullet. But, a chewed bullet always has teeth marks on opposite sides of the bullet. Your bullet has indentions on only one side, so it cannot be a chewed bullet.

 

[Pointman]

That makes perfect sense about the fire melted bullet. The other detectorist told me that he also found melted lead. I was wondering exactly why the bullet didn't have any grooves, why it was "chewed" only on one side (it also didn't look like teeth marks exactly) and why it was blackened. I was also wondering in the bottom photo of why the cavity had bulged out.

Interestingly I just read where the house across the street was HQ for General Steele and the place where we had found the relics it stated that the Union Army had camped opposite from the house.