When one thinks of the guns that won the West, one naturally envisions such familiar weapons as the Winchester, Henry, and Spencer repeating rifles, the trapdoor Springfield, the Smith & Wesson revolver, and the Colt Peacemaker. Thinking back even further, there were the older percussion-cap rifles such as the Hawken buffalo gun or its flintlock predecessors, the Kentucky and Pennsylvania long rifles. Largely unknown to the general public is a singular weapon that never belched out gunpowder or killed a single human being in the United States, but that was perhaps the single most influential weapon in the opening of the American West: the Girandoni air rifle, the secret weapon of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
The earliest known example of the Girandoni air rifle is currently on display at Stockholm, Sweden’s Livrustkammeran Museum and dates to around 1580. Featured in fairly large calibers, these pneumatic weapons were employed by the very wealthy in hunting large game such as deer and wild boar. But around 1780 an enterprising Tyrolean gunsmith named Bartolomeo Girandoni developed a rugged new model air rifle that was soon adopted by the Austrian military. Produced in .46-caliber, the Girandoni was a quantum leap forward in weapons technology.
The Rapid-Fire Windbusche
The rifle was four feet long and weighed 10 pounds. The butt of the weapon was an iron flask that could be detached, pumped full of air, and then refitted to the weapon. Each rifle was issued with three such air reservoirs. The Girandoni was approximately the same length and weight of a conventional musket and was loaded with 22 lead rifle balls that were propelled out of the weapon individually by controlled bursts of compressed air. Fed into a loading tube alongside the barrel of the weapon, these rifle balls were loaded into the weapon individually by a simple steel block, which slid back and forth at the base of the breech. Much like the popular modern-day Daisy Red Ryder BB gun, the rifle balls were fed into the breech with the aid of gravity, the muzzle of the weapon being held upright as the bullets rolled down toward the breech. One crucial advantage to this loading mechanism was the fact that the rifleman, rather than having to stand upright to load, could actually lie on the ground and simply hold the weapon up vertically.
