The mission presented to the Corps was enormous, to say the least.
Firearms of all kinds made the trip.
Thankfully, Lewis wasnt the only one keeping a diary.
…He showed us his air gun which fired 22 times at one charge.
It is a curious piece of workmanship not easily described and therefore I omit attempting it.
Girandoni and adopted by the Austrian military in the late 1700s.
Its mechanism isunique among air guns, as its buttstock also served as an air reservoir.
This air tank held 800 p.s.i.
of air pressure charged with a rod-piston pump that required almost 1,500 strokes to reach full pressure capacity.
A small tube magazine mounted on the right side of the rifled barrel held 22 .46-caliber lead balls.
Gravity fed each ball into a sliding breech block that was held taut by a straight leaf spring.
Another journal entry from August 17, 1805, notes: …
I also shot my air-gun which was so perfectly incomprehensible that they immediately denominated it the great medicine.
Or was it just the one gun?
People have long wondered what happened to the original air gun owned and carried by Meriwether Lewis.
Had it succumbed to hard use and been discarded?
This has been debated by historians and gun collectors dating back to 1956.
What they found was that the mainspring was unlike any other that they had previously encountered on a Girandoni.
It was a flat mainspring and not the typical V spring as one would expect to find.
This is where it ties back into Lewis entry about John Shields working on the air guns mainspring.
In a way, its like the gun came full circle after 200 years.
