And Now, for Something Completely Different
The Girandoni rifle was a fascinating piece of shooting technology. Lewis and Clark carried one along on their famous cross-continent adventure, and it served them well – a .46 caliber weapon capable of killing deer-sized game, and a repeater at that, with a magazine holding up to 22 lead balls – making it one of the first effective magazine-fed repeaters.
What it wasn’t was a firearm. Why not? Because the Girandoni was an air rifle.
To discover the origins of this piece, we must go back a quarter-century and across the Atlantic Ocean to Italy, where we will visit a man named Bartolomeo Girandoni.
Not much is known about Signore Girandoni other than that his rifle was in service with the Austrian Army from 1780 until about 1815. The Austrians called the piece the Windbüchse (wind rifle) and they favored its rate of fire and effective range of 125 yards or so – which was pretty good in those days of smoothbore muskets. The rifle also had the advantage of producing no loud report or cloud of black-powder smoke to reveal the shooter’s position – but it was clunky and awkward, sometimes difficult to use in the field. So the Austrian Empire’s armed services returned to the more staid black-powder muzzle-loaders.
And on to America
One Girandoni rifle, however, made its way through mysterious means across the Atlantic and ended up in the hands of Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark (no relation) as they were preparing to make their epic, continent-spanning journey of exploration. The two quickly grew fond of the air rifle, for some of the same reasons Austrian troops favored it: Low report, no smoke, decent accuracy, impervious to rain and snow, and had enough power to kill at least deer-sized game. Its high rate of fire was sure on the list, as well.
If you were looking for a piece to be the AR-15 of its time, the Girandoni would be a good candidate.
See Related: New Jersey AR-15 Ban Ruled Unconstitutional - but Magazine Ban Upheld
However, that wasn’t the primary use of the Girandoni. Captain Lewis quickly realized the quick-firing piece could make an impression on the native tribes he encountered, and he put the piece to good use doing just that.
When the men involved in the expedition encountered Native Americans, they did their best to impress them through pomp and ceremony. Lewis and Clark often wore their most colorful military uniforms, with their flags flying and fifes whistling. They’d meet with the group and proceed to hand out different gifts, including colored cloth, commemorative medallions, and beads.
At some point during this “ceremony,” Lewis would take out his air rifle and shoot it a few times, confident he’d impress his audience.
Take, for example, the reaction of the Teton Sioux, who witnessed Meriwether Lewis fire his air gun in a ceremony held on August 30, 1804. The diary account by Joseph Whitehouse, who served as a tailor on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, states:
“Captain Lewis shot his air gun and told them there was medicine in her and that she would do great execution. They were all amazed at the curiosity and soon as he had shot a few times, they all ran hastily to see the ball holes in the tree. They shouted aloud at the site of the execution, they were all amazed at the curiosity.”
While Captain Lewis’s famous diaries don’t state this explicitly, the rapid-firing and effective Girandoni may well have dissuaded some aggressive natives who may have contemplated ambushing the American party.
How it Worked
The Girandoni’s operation was not only different from the more usual black-powder front-stuffing smoke poles of the time, but it was different from a lot of air rifles in use today.
The compressed air that powered the piece was stored in a detachable air reservoir, which also made up the stock of the piece. Multiple reservoirs made for a quick reload. The reservoirs were charged with a hand pump, requiring as much as 1,500 strokes of the hand pump to fully charge the piece.
The gun Lewis and Clark took on their expedition reportedly had a 22-round magazine for the .42 (some accounts say .42, some say .46) caliber lead balls the piece used. The magazine was in the form of a spring-loaded tube alongside the barrel
To arm the piece, one had to have a charged reservoir in place. Then, one filled the magazine. The gun had a sliding breech block that slides from side to side; each shot required simply sliding the breech block to one side to gather up a ball, then (accounts vary) either the block would return to battery via a spring or being pushed back by hand – then the piece would be cocked and fired.
The Girandoni was reputed to have a muzzle velocity of 1,000 feet per second, although I’m rather skeptical of that. With a bit of practice, the 22-round magazine could be emptied in about 30 seconds, making this arm something of an “assault weapon” of its day – although the Western plains and mountains of North America in the early 1800s were notoriously short of hoplophobes or fainting couches for them to collapse onto after learning of this air rifle’s capacities.See Related: Dumbest Idea Ever: Biden Again Stumping for 'Assault Weapon,' Bump-Stock Ban in New Ad
The Girandoni had its downsides, too. It was complex by the standards of its time. The air canisters, as we have noted, required a lot of work to charge. The seals in the air system had to be kept greased to maintain a seal, and the weapon had a short service life and required quite a lot of maintenance.
The Other Expedition Weapons
Most of the expedition that accompanied Lewis and Clark were equipped with the 1795 Harper’s Ferry flintlock musket, the Harper’s Ferry Model 1803, also a flintlock, and William Clark carried along his personal “Kentucky” rifle. The flintlocks built at Harper’s Ferry, like the later products of the famous Springfield Armory, were robust, simple, and reliable – perfect for the type of expedition Lewis and Clark were undertaking. This relegated the Girandoni to mostly novelty status, but it was a novelty indeed and set the pattern for much later military rifles.
In short, the Girandoni, while interesting and unique in its day, may have been – forgive the flintlockian metaphor – a flash in the pan, but it wasn’t without historical significance. The US Army today still practices “accuracy by volume” at times, and the Girandoni, with its 22-round “high capacity" magazine and its high rate of fire, set the stage for later weapons with a much greater capacity for sending freedom pills downrange at ever-increasing rates. Did Meriwether Lewis and William Clark see a little bit of the future in the air rifle they hauled along? Perhaps – or perhaps not – but whether they knew it or not, they were surely looking at the shape of things to come.
