Hey Gabe!
It is indeed a nice find buddy.
May I tell you whay it could have chew marks on it?
A lot of guys think it was the wounded men after battle that would "bite the bullet" durring surgery to ease their pain.
Not so. In my Opinion. I would rather chew on a shoe than a piece of lead right?
The shot was lubed with lard and when fired, the pigs or other wilderness critters would chew on them...In My Opinion...Tasty!
Here "in my opinion" is where the term came from:
I don't know how "bite the bullet" started, but sometimes it was literally necessary to bite the bullet. In the 1850s the British Army in India received a new arm, the recently invented Enfield rifle, named after the arsenal in Enfield. One of the peculiarities of that weapon was that you had to bite off the ends of lubricated cartridges. The Indians in the British Army in India, or sepoys, believed, correctly "that the grease used to lubricate the cartridges was a mixture of pigs' and cows' lard; thus, to have oral contact with it was an insult to both Muslims and Hindus. Late in April 1857, sepoy troopers at Meerut refused the cartridges; as punishment, they were given long prison terms, fettered, and put in jail," as the EB relates. The reluctance of the sepoys to "bite the bullet" resulted first in mutiny, then in a spreading rebellion among outraged Indians.
S.M.A.R.T.S. CLUB FORUM
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