In this picture of a Russian Cossack immigrant, taken at Ellis Island sometime between 1905 and 1914, his traditional dress (or uniform) has many narrow, vertical pockets at the top of his jacket, each with a narrow cylinder of some sort. It doesn’t look like ammunition to me, and I think it is unlikely that a an immigrant coming through Ellis Island would be carrying firearms anyway (though he does have a knife and sword).
Article I read some time back said that during the muzzleloader era they would carry paper cartridges in the pockets. Now, they’re strictly ornamental.
With GMT, they probably contain a mix of prune juice and castor oil as a mood enhancer.
They are/were ammo. At first it was paper cartridges and then later brass “quick charge tubes” usually for a rifle but sometimes for a horse-pistol as well. As more modern guns became available they same loops/area on the tunic would be used to hold some shells/ammo in much the same manner. The guns adopted were single shot of a large caliber and ammo was much the same size. What surprises some people is how many cossacks held on to their flint or percussion weapons well into the cartridge era; like a lot of the Arabic tribes, tradition in weapons was a big deal and things were handed down for generations. I still have (and sometimes shoot) Great-great-granddad’s Tulle and Granddad still packed it as a regular thing. Dance groups today often use pieces of ribbon or cloth to simulate this but that dude in the picture looks to have the real deal brass quick-charge tubes.
As for what one would carry in his pockets, think in terms of most militias. Military supplies, a religious item or two and a personal item or three. Granddad always carried a beard token which has been in our family since the time of Peter the Great and he always had a small icon-ish metal cross he got as a child.
(Although we are Siberian and Granddad spent most of his time in one of the home-guard detachments under a local hetman, he did serve at the end before coming to the US with the 2nd Kuban.)
I notice there are twenty cylinders, possible ring-holders, there are twenty-one rings. He is probably aware of the lies about the rings being destroyed (ha!) or removed from Middle-Earth (ha ha!!). Seems obvious what he’s got in his nasty little pocketses
A later photo (#25) shows two men with something similar, and is captioned “Russian Cossacks, armed and in full dress” which would support the cartridge theory.
