🔎 UNIDENTIFIED Modern bullet or not?

[stevengugas]

Posting for a friend who found this in her yard. The park across from her yard was a Civil War camp site. It looks modern to me but wanted to get expert opinions.

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Agony and Death on a Gold Rush Steamer: The Disastrous Sinking of the Side-Wheeler Yankee Blade - Grab it through Amazon!

[DizzyDigger]

I'm certainly no expert, but it doesn't look like a modern bullet to me. The caliber is quite large, and looks bigger than a .45.

 

[smokeythecat]

Yes, it is modern. The tiny vertical grooves in the lines are the give away.

 

[TheCannonballGuy]

Smokey is correct. The multiple tiny parallel ridges inside your bullet's body grooves first start showing up about 1877... and did not become "commonplace" on bullets until the very-early 20th-Century. Those parallel ridges (very similar to the edges of US dimes, quarters, halves, and $1-coins) are called a "reeded body-groove" or a knurled cannelure.

There is a chance your bullet was made in the late-1800s, but annual statistics on bullet production indicate your find was (by far) most likely made sometime in the early 20th-Century.

Identifying it correctly without precise measurement of its diameter is difficult. If I had to guess, I'd say it is an early-1900s bullet for the Indian Wars era US Army .45 Colt metallic-cartridge revolver. (The civil war version of that pistol was 44-caliber, not .45.)