Hello everybody, I recently found in the Official Records an extract from an artillery report for the Army of the West and the Army of the Mississippi from late May 1862 just before the evacuation of Corinth, Mississippi. Found here

http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=moawar;cc=moawar;idno=waro0010;node=waro0010%3A3;view=image;seq=811;size=100;page=root

it shows the Army of the Mississippi as having a total of 97 artillery pieces as of 25 May '62 and the Army of the West as having 48 cannon as of 25 May. My question is, would these numbers probably be about the same for the beginning of May? Because they seem to me to be quite a bit lower than the numbers I had come up with. For example, in Larry Daniel's Cannoneers in Gray he says on page 38 that when Van Dorn brought his Army of the West across the Mississippi to Corinth he brought with him no less than seventy artillery pieces. Now it also goes on to mention that there was considerable reorganization after arriving in Corinth, that the thirteen Missouri batteries were consolidated into ten to allow each to have enough privates, and as the information Danny Odom has been so kind as to provide us with shows that there were orders to assign one battery to each brigade in the Army of the West, keep either two or three batteries in Meriwether Clark's artillery brigade and I believe the rest were to be transferred to the Army of the Mississippi. Could the 70 cannon he started with have been reduced to 48 by this means?

But that also makes me wonder about the Army of the Mississippi. From what it says in the U.S. Army's staff ride handbook for the Battle of Shiloh the Confederate Army of the Mississippi had 117 cannon at the start of that battle. Everybody knows that they captured some additional cannon from the federals on the first day at Shiloh and in turn lost some cannon to the federals on Shiloh's second day. Is it possible they could have come away from Shiloh twenty guns poorer than they started and that explains the 117 becoming 97 guns? I think some artillery pieces, probably the oldest and least usable ones I guess, were put in storage at Grenada, Miss. I've also heard that around this time there were orders to standardize the C.S. artillery batteries on a four-gun model rather than some being 4-gun, some 6-gun etc. So could that conversion process account or at least partially account for the lower numbers for rebel artillery on 25 May than on 6 April?