From the combat drills to the payment we talk about the unsung heroes of the average soldier during the American revolutionary war.
[00:00:00] What's she gonna do brother when Jeff Townsend media runs wild on you America stories
[00:01:25] You can check out the podcast of course. We'll go ahead and get an early plug in America stories.us and I like I said We're eight episodes in going on the ninth now. So check out the previous episodes
[00:01:29] We're kind of going in order through American history here
[00:01:31] We're doing this in a fun light-hearted manner and it's I think it's interesting stuff too. I think if
[00:01:38] You don't even need history class if you just listen to this podcast. So American history. It's not needed. We'll just give you
[00:01:45] Yeah, we've got you I Little dogs are important These were people who Were on the front lines. It means if people were dying for this cause right and They they definitely deserved their due But it's interesting to know like what was the day-to-day life of one of these soldiers?
[00:03:01] When they weren't fighting so
[00:03:03] the average evolutionary
[00:04:07] So at the time, we're just knowing that this was going to be resolved diplomatically still. And so it's like, well, we see it hold at this level of troops for a while.
[00:04:14] And then later, we'll just, you know, well, after we discuss things, we won't need them
[00:04:19] anymore.
[00:04:20] That's six months, it's still a long time.
[00:04:21] Don't give me your own.
[00:04:22] I mean, that's a really long time when you're doing that every day.
[00:04:25] Yeah. pay was around $0.35 a month, which equals to be about $1,300 in today's dollars. Not a substantial amount today's money either, really. No, not really. No, especially because they had to buy their own equipment and uniform. Oh, wow. Yeah, all their musket balls and
[00:05:44] everything they had to pay for themselves out of pocket. So obviously there was a lot was mixed a little bit of water, flour, salt, and some of the beef fat into a pancake. And then they cooked that up on a board, which I think was called a Bannock board. Then that would be cooked up next and put it back in there. So kind of jerky. Yeah, exactly. They were also give a daily ration of about two ounces, two, three ounces of hard spirits.
[00:08:21] Uh, that was to go into your canteen of water.
[00:08:25] Uh, you would get usually probably a creek.
[00:09:22] of a kick, if you know what I mean.
[00:09:25] It's to sterilize the, uh, crick water or lake water or whatever the heck they were doing.
[00:09:28] He's okay.
[00:09:29] Does that actually work?
[00:09:31] Well, it did somewhat.
[00:09:33] It's actually why if you will drink so much beer back in the day,
[00:09:36] because beer was easier to drink once it had a little bit of fermentation,
[00:09:41] they would make what's called small beers and it would have like one ounce or two
[00:09:45] or 1% or 2% alcohol.
[00:10:40] So they were those lines. They also, while they didn't necessarily know
[00:10:43] about the bacteria, they didn't know
[00:10:44] that they needed to preserve it, right?
[00:10:46] They had to take action to make sure either food
[00:10:49] or drink would go bad.
[00:10:52] So that's why they would like pickle or brine,
[00:10:55] like meats and like casks and jars and things like that.
[00:10:59] They would put like a lost salt and saltwater
[00:11:02] to preserve the meat longer.
[00:11:05] And then they probably just said like,
[00:11:06] well, it's preserved the water longer. and that's shortly after the battle of Boston, that Bay and I became a bayonet practice and having a little more widespread. They definitely knew that they needed them after Bunker Hill, and they just flat out, produced them to get them in time. A day of drilling would last eight hours solid,
[00:12:23] regardless of whether you didn't have time to eat Obviously the other thing they love doing at night is they played games and I found this really interesting Researching this I was like what kind of games were popular that so there were two that were the most popular in camp Can we guess these real quick before please I'm gonna say I'm gonna guess first hide and seek and duck duck goose
[00:13:44] Exactly what I was gonna say no H I S T if you played you care ever, it's essentially you care Taking current game The only major difference between Wist and you care is you use every card in the deck as opposed to just the Was it nine through? Ace you know Use all of them and wist also you have a hand of 13. We're gonna skip over the fact that
[00:16:04] you thought it was actually called Luka when you first started playing it. So that's why you liked it so much.
[00:16:06] Yeah, absolutely why.
[00:16:09] So day to day life in the camp was kept under control with really strict punishments.
[00:16:19] Actually to a point that I wanted to do to alternative that if you just defecated on the ground and what if you went to the woods? If they caught you it would be execution mean, he's John Brown. Man, so that, so, okay, so let me get, let me dive a deeper to this vault. Yeah, so I'm going to go to the far end. Yeah. So how did you, okay, so if you're defecating in a vault, which sounds terrible, which is a hole in the ground, basically, that is covered on,
[00:19:01] so are they going down into the vault to defecate?
[00:19:04] Are they defecating down into it through an opening? I believe what I've read that was kind of like a camp shared duty basically If you saw that was full you you and your massive guys would would Cover and then start digging the next one You're on vault duty tonight boys
[00:20:20] So it's kind of like you know when the trash needs to be taken out and there they were on the march, they had to take everything that they needed with them, obviously. So when you were on the march for a day, which would be about eight hours every day, you'd be carrying about 45 pounds of gear. That would be your rifle, your bullets and powder,
[00:21:41] rations, mesquite, canteen, blankets,
[00:21:45] and stuff like that on your back. The fresh beef was dried beef or pemma-ken, which is dried beef is stored inside of a fat. Yeah. Let's go back to the million-dollar question of the defecating. Because there are a lot of people listen to... I'm surprised with the number of people who listen to this podcast, and I feel like I
[00:23:02] got to do it just as...
[00:23:04] Feel free to contact me if you would just try to sneak away while your lieutenant wasn't looking and then dig a hole and go. Oh, man, this sounds terrible. So they didn't carry in shovels or that. I mean,
[00:24:23] everybody had their shovel or something like a lot of personal hygiene, which is important, but man, like. This is like these are stricter rules than like just go and hunt in the woods. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just actually one of, like I said, it's 100% why I was like, oh, this is the
[00:25:44] episode we're doing this week.
[00:25:46] Well, I talk about this because I found out this fact.
[00:26:42] like what were these guys doing? They're shitting all over each other.
[00:26:43] This is extremely, I'm going to kill them.
[00:26:45] I'm going to kill them.
[00:26:46] I was heavily involved with George Washington's reforms
[00:26:51] of how the camps were run.
[00:26:53] And Ben Franklin was kind of like an early pioneer
[00:26:56] in terms of hygiene and stuff like that.
[00:26:59] So he gave a-
[00:27:00] Did he have syphilis?
[00:27:02] Nevermind.
[00:27:03] Yeah, that's it.
[00:27:05] What do they say on the office? family. Oh, that's a good question. This guy, you do not understand how often this guy would defecate. We had to shoot him. Like, how could you how could this be accepted? Like, maybe
[00:28:20] devastating. That's a good question. I believe they were at the time were the fastest of reloading and firing again. And that's why they were so great at winning battles because they could break the enemy lines quickly with just a volley after volley of musket balls for those of you listening.
[00:29:41] I hope you leave these clicking sounds and it's also have them anymore. I wonder if this is a, I don't want to hold this up for him for, but I know it varies greatly, but how long would they typically stay at a camp do you think? So that would obviously depend on whether or not they were planning on campaigning or attacking somewhere. Sometimes
[00:31:02] like during the winter they would hole up almost the entire winter in that they didn't know. On top of that, they didn't want any sexually transmitted diseases to have in the camps. All these things would have cut the ability of the war machine to be able to fight. At this point, there were probably about 12,000 colonial army.
[00:32:24] It never got bigger than 17,000. of most other navies, which is like rations of meat and what they call ships biscuits, which was basically hard to act. I'm not really sure what the difference between hard to act and ship biscuits other than to help dry the bread. They would leave it out in the open so that like the salty air would dry it out even more. But they would come up with dishes that they would they
[00:33:40] come up with names for the dishes. And some people believe that they're silly dark sort of question, I guess. So obviously we talked about death, and that would definitely happen as they went along of these marches to these different camps and just this time passed by. How would they handle a death of somebody, like, ritually speaking, do we know what they would do? So they would usually do a burial.
[00:35:00] If they're near town, you would be buried
[00:35:03] in the cemetery of that town.
[00:35:05] And, you know, this was, you no, no, no clothing was supplied. In fact, one man wrote in his journal that during when in Valley, when they were holed up in Valley Forge, his socks had all been like rotten and torn away. And so he had no socks
[00:36:22] inside his shoes while he was, you know, so of their excess stuff. Some places hated it because this was going to possibly take away from the
[00:37:42] townsfolk who needed stuff. So they would't always get the money. That was an issue.
[00:39:00] They would always be like, give you basically an IOU and you would just have to accept that. They did what they could. They inoculation was a known practice for smallpox, but it was not a socially accepted practice. And so they didn't usually practice inoculation in the camp, even though they really should have because a lot of people died just from smallpox. Can you explain what that is?
[00:40:20] The way they did it, you would take a bit of the. Some people just got, you know, they just got it. The Fox and even the people who did survive would probably be like permanently scarred wherever the inoculation or whatever you want to call it took place. You can't crap in the woods, but I'm going to stick a stick in you with smallpox on it. Yeah been effective, but they were certainly not very organized. So it's unlikely that they would be able to like win the war. Did they defecate all over that fort, you think? Oh, sure, I'm sure they did. I was trying to, I lost thought of what I was gonna say originally. I think it's okay, I got it now.
[00:43:00] It's important to note though, like you said,
[00:43:03] I don't know how long would go between battles
[00:43:05] or even fights, like,, each individual soldier was supposed to be there. They needed some kind of constant that there was no like walking away from this. They had to really become like a guys running the show and Founding Fathers Congress. I'll ruin a phrase that they had Probably really no clue what these what these men were going through He went the families everybody But they probably didn't have any clue what it was like on the front line or not to the extent that it was yeah There's there's no way so they're like you know, we're gonna fight with dignity. We're gonna follow these standards
[00:45:44] we're gonna follow these rules and
[00:46:44] Just the grind of survival internally and just inside that group was insane. So thought provoking conversation.
[00:46:46] You guys did a good job picking this one out.
[00:46:48] Well, we'll go ahead and segue now towards the end.
[00:46:51] We've been going on here.
[00:46:52] It's been a good conversation.
[00:46:54] I appreciate it, guys.
[00:46:56] If you want to learn more, maybe Jack will get some more information up on
[00:47:00] americastories.us about the episode.
[00:47:02] Maybe he can find a couple pictures of volts.
[00:47:04] Oh, yes.
[00:47:04] Maybe he can find a couple pictures of, which is that's one second. I'll say that way you're looking. I've got another challenge for Jack directly. Not only does he need to give me people in history. I feel like more people need to do that. You need to read more just the big names. More than the name brand Coca-Cola of historical figures, you need to Some of us do the best we can Run! Run! Everybody's been in time when it's been in time Run! Run!
[00:51:02] Everybody's been in time when it's been in time