Dear Monk, ,when those lobster backs came to the ind of the day without firing a shot, did they pull their loads and dump their powder. If not, where did they get the next days prime?
As to priming with rifle powder, I think that works fine BUT it seems much easier to me to prime from a small horn of rifle powder and not fight with the powder horn and strap with the rifle cradled in your arm. And I doubt frontiervrifleman pulled their loads at the end of the day.
From what I read they did not pull the charges at the end of the day when setting up camp. Plugged the vent and the muzzle. From what I could find in some writings one of the troopers was entrusted with a small supply of powder and a powder measure. The measure in the event they had to make up fresh cartridges in the field.
Some of this depends on the time in question. The English black powder into the early 1700s was pretty bad stuff. The English did not realize the need to purify raw saltpeter until about that time. The powder made with raw saltpeter was very prone to getting damp.
If black powder is made with very high purity potassium nitrate it is extremely resistant to water in the form of moisture in the air.
When C&H produced their own potassium nitrate that had a simple purity test. They placed a weighed amount in a pan and placed it in a humidity chamber on a scale. Then slowly raised the humidity in the chamber. As the humidity increased the powder would pick up only trace amounts of water. At 92% R.H. it would suddenly begin to increase in weight from the water being picked up from the air. At 99% R.H. the maximum acceptable increase was 1.6%. If it picked up a greater weight it was rejected.
I almost hesitate to get into it this way but it is the only way to explain something.
We tend to judge historical writings based on our experiences with black powder. When I first started flintlock deer hunting in PA, way back, I was upset at having to change lock prime frequently on damp days. Then once I started looking deep into the black powder subject things began to make more sense. For 25 years we dealt mainly with GOEX out of the old Moosic, PA plant. They were stuck with single sources of potassium nitrate and charcoal. They simply had to take what they could get and be glad they got it. With the charcoal the ash content could vary from 5% to 15%. The ash being the mineral content of the wood and the ash was hygroscopic above 30% R.H. At high humidity it becomes deliquescent. Meaning it can pull enough moisture out of the air to dissolve itself and form a solution. Then the potassium nitrate had about one half of one percent of sodium nitrate in it. Sodium nitrate being deliquescent. When I extracted water-soluble stuff out of the powder and dried it to 0% moisture I found that at 99% R.H. it would pick up 16% by weight of water from the air and dissolve itself. So the powder was hygroscopic far out of proportion to earlier powders made in plants where they purified their own potassium nitrate and used charcoal only if the ash content was 2.5% or less.
I recall seeing a little powder horn in a book from Holland. A very old horn. Inscribed with; "May an angel urinate in your touchole". As close as the translation gets. And if the powder was made properly that is about the only way the charge would get too damp to use.
