So I hooked up the can shield to ground as mikb55 suggested, that gave me the light on the CAN Shield labeled RX.
It seems to have changed the data coming into putty but it is still unrecognizable characters (boxes). I also got the Seeed CAN bus shield in today and was able to try it out.
This might be a dumb question but should I be monitoring on putty via the serial port on the shield, or the usb port on the arduino? When I run the serial monitor on Arduino, on COM3 (Arduino USB), the CAN initializes and is able to connect, but then I get no data. When I run the serial monitor on COM4 (serial-usb from Canbus shield), thats when I get all the un-readable data. I am still using the same code I posted above
horace:
if you have a seeed CANBUS shield you may find this Canbus monitor useful
I tried to use the Canbus monitor and I was not able to get it to initialize. I will try again tomorrow and post what the errors were