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Authentic cannon cast for re-enactment role
© St. Petersburg Times You have to live, for just the shortest while, inside the heads of historical re-enactors to realize how important authenticity is to them. I met one once who, during events, would only eat authentic rations available to soldiers from the time period. Sometimes he ate nothing but hard tack. Another spent months looking for appropriate antique eyeglasses, and went without, in the field, until he found them. Appearance of a digital watch on the scene of a re-enactment of the Seminole Wars or the War Between the States could lead to fisticuffs. So it was no surprise to me that I found myself and 20 or so other folks standing around in the cold Saturday morning to watch a bunch of guys dressed in period costumes fire a replica cannon. It means that in this, the 23rd year of re-enactments of the battle in which Maj. Francis Langhorne Dade and all but two members of his command of 107 soldiers were slain by Seminole Indians, there will be an authentic replica cannon used. The battle, for years, was referred to as a "massacre," and Massacre was the title of the first edition of the book written by historian Frank Laumer who narrates the annual re-enactment, but the loaded word was dropped from both the re-enactment and the book title, and Laumer, in a brief speech Saturday, paid tribute to "brave men, red and white," who died in the Dec. 28, 1835, conflict. But for all of its 23 years, the re-enactment has had to fudge on the accuracy of the cannon that Dade and his men were transporting to Fort King near Ocala. "We've pretty much used anything we could get our hands on," Laumer said. A couple of times the re-enactment borrowed a mountain howitzer built to fire a 12-pound ball, twice the size of that carried by Dade and his men. For the past 10 years the Dade Battlefield Society, the organization that puts on the re-enactment, has been raising funds for a cannon that is a faithful replica of the "double trail" (which refers to the construction of the cart that carries the cannon) 6-pound piece that Dade and his men wrestled across four rivers between Fort Brooke in Tampa and the battlefield where they died. Finally, for $8,500, the society paid M.R. Ducks, a Fayetteville, Tenn. firm, to make the cannon. Mike Managan who did most of the work, said it took a lot of research before specifications for the cannon were found in 1830s U.S. Military Academy records available at Vanderbilt University, and that it took the company two months to make the cannon. The piece delivered Saturday has a maximum range of 1,300 yards, he said, although its effective range is considered to be 300 yards. Its effectiveness in the kind of guerrilla fighting used by the Seminoles in a plan masterminded by Osceola, was practically nil. Dade was killed by the first shot fired in the ambush, and his men hastily constructed a flimsy breastwork of pine logs, and fought most of the hours-long battle from behind it. The cannon was fired 49 times before the "match" used to touch it off went out. Near the end, the soldiers firing the cannon tried to come into the breastwork, but were held off by an officer who pointed a pistol at them and said, "you will die in the discharge of your duty or at my hand." A few minutes later they were dead. The original cannon was found by a relief column in a marsh near the battlefield, and had been spiked. There is no record of its current location. Bob Pate, Dennis Johnson and Gary Fischer, the Lakeland crew who will man the gun, split the usual somber silence at the battlefield by firing the new-old cannon first, followed by Park Manager Barbara Roberts and Laumer. The gun stood on the same spot where its predecessor stood during the battle, and Laumer recited briefly from the journal of an officer with the relief column that found the bodies of Dade's men. He suggested that the original cannon might be placed, "near the shrine where devotion's eye may dim for the fate and petition for the soul of these unshriven dead . . . and although the pomp of the soldiers laureled here was absent, yet sympathy mourned and sorrow wept." The next re-enactment will be Dec. 28-29 at 2 p.m. on each day.
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