December 29, 2001

Bob,

I have seen both Spanish and French surviving mountain howitzers, neither of which has handles - the original drawing of the French model was published in The Artilleryman magazine a couple of years ago. I have never seen or heard of a mountain howitzer with handles except the hokey Preuss drawing.

You don't need much technical knowledge of artillery to know the Preuss drawing is hokey, at least as published. Anyone who would draw a carriage - any kind of carriage - as unrealistically as that one is done (I think "cartoonish" describes it as well as any other word), is just as likely to put handles, or even donkey ears, on a cannon that didn't have them.

In my 22 years of fairly deep involvement in Civil War artillery, nothing I read or see in print surprises me. Some of the stories I have heard involving artillery are beyond belief, and some of them come from people who have a little bit of knowledge about artillery and should know better.

I have no real facts on which to determine if the Army would have used foreign cannon during official operations. I know the Navy had a lot of old obsolete foreign cannon in inventory in the 1940s, as I have that inventory on microfilm; so maybe the Army did too.On the other hand,the Navy did not use them as most had been condemned.The Army bought sample cannon during members of the Ordnance Board's trips to Europe to study then-current ordnance development there; so they may have used them after they were finished studying them.

Playing devil's advocate, the argument against using the foreign cannon is that the Army would most likely not have had projectiles for them. Foreign bore diameters differed from U.S.; so that would be a problem. I don't find any orders for oddball size projectiles in the document (NA RG156 E152) we nickname "Contracts" that covers ordnance purchases from about 1820 through part of 1861. Ordnance purchases starting in 1861 are documented in the much better known "Document 99" (SS1338 v.12). I still maintain that the odds of two mountain howitzers, whether French, Spanish, or U.S. being lost within 100 miles of each other are so minute as to defy logic.

Thus, I feel the tube in Carson City almost has to be the Fremont howitzer. Regarding the drawing, I still say that any "artist" who would draw the carriage the way that one is drawn was capable of drawing a cannon that was just as unauthentic. I suspect the "artist" may have actually based his drawing on a cannon he saw long after the event, perhaps a Spanish one that bore no resemblance to the mountain howitzer. I don't know how good an artist that man was supposed to be, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was as competent as most of the cannon "experts" are. Wayne Stark

Wayne Stark

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