“The Girardoni was the first repeating rifle to see regular military service and the first to employ a tubular magazine. It featured a magazine of 22 shots and had an effective range of 125 yards.”

By John Danielski

ON SEPT. 24, 1804, Captain Meriwether Lewis and his men confronted an armed gathering of the Brule Band of Teton Sioux on the site of present- day Pierre, South Dakota.

A renegade brave had stolen the last horse of the Lewis and Clark expedition and Lewis wanted it back. Neither group spoke the other’s language and both sides were uncertain about the intentions of the other. As precautions, the Indians had pulled their bow strings tau  and Lewis’s men had shouldered arms. Violence was the last thing Lewis wanted; the expedition had not only been tasked with exploring the Louisiana Purchase but turning the vast region’s Native American inhabitants into friends of the United States.

Lewis resolved the situation with a unique rifle. Attracting the attention of Black Buffalo, the Sioux leader, he produced a strange gun that looked nothing like the ones carried by the fur traders with whom the Sioux were familiar. He pointed to a cottonwood tree a hundred yards distant and fired a shot into its center. The weapon gave no flash, made almost no noise, had little recoil and gave off no smoke. He then fired four more shots in rapid succession without reloading.

The Sioux murmured in awe and wonderment as modern people would if they had just witnessed a demonstration of a laser rifle. The chief was impressed. and his men put down their bows and gathered round. Though tensions remained high, sheer curiosity broke the immediate standoff as a weapon of war became an instrument of peace.

Lewis’s weapon was an Austrian Girardoni air rifle. Mentioned 39 times in Lewis’s journals, it appears to have been used chiefly as “a demonstration model,” to impress Native Americans.

Lewis made the piece part of a dog and pony show of sorts that he regularly employed with the tribes he encountered. He and Captain Clark would come to a meeting clad in their most splendid blue and red uniforms, with plenty of pomp, circumstance, music, and presents, then Lewis would ask the Native Americans if they wanted to see something that contained powerful medicine. He never allowed the Indians to see the inner workings of the weapon and conveyed the idea that the Girardoni had an unlimited supply of ammunition.

Two explanations for how Lewis came into possession of this remarkable weapon have been advanced. Historian Stephen Ambrose believes Lewis purchased it at the shop of gunsmith Isaiah Lukens in Philadelphia but offers no explanation of how Lukens obtained an Austrian weapon. The second is more convincing to this author: the gun was presented to Lewis by President Thomas Jefferson, likely purchased when he was the American minister to France. Jefferson was a prolific inventor with a fondness for gadgets and Lewis had served as his private secretary for two years.

The Girardoni was the first repeating rifle to see regular military service and the first to employ a tubular magazine. The product of the Tyrolese Master Gunsmith Bartolomeo Girardoni, the weapon acquired the nickname of windbusche, or “wind rifle.”

Invented in 1779, it was first used by the Hapsburgs in the Austro-Turkish War of 1788-1791. The French considered it a terror weapon because it gave off no smoke. In fact, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the summary execution of any Austrian caught with one in his possession. Because of early complaints by officers that rustic recruits were too stupid to operate them properly, they were later assigned exclusively to sniper units.

As many as 1,300 were manufactured in Austria between 1779 and 1815 but civilian versions made in the 1820s occasionally enter the current antiques market. Curiously, a fair number of English copies exist; evidence that the weapon achieved enough success to warrant being copied by foreign gunsmiths.

The Girardoni weighed 10 pounds, was four feet long, and possessed an octagonal, rifled barrel that featured 12 lands and grooves. It had open sights and at 50 yards; Lewis could regularly place shots in a circle the size of a British shilling. The weapon fired a .455 caliber, 1,553 grain ball at 453 feet per second — considerably slower than the 1,000 feet per second of a Brown Bess musket ball. It featured a magazine of 22 shots and had an effective range of 125 yards: noticeably shorter than the 200-yard range of the British Baker Rifle or American Model 1803 Harper’s Ferry Rifle, with which many of Lewis’s men were armed.

The weapon was powered by cylinder of compressed air housed in the buttstock. The air was pressurized to 800 PSI. By comparison, the tire of a modern semi trailer is only pressurized to 105 PSI. The entire buttstock could be unscrewed so the cylinder within could be recharged. That was done with a pump much like a modern bicycle pump: it took 1,500 strokes and 30 minutes to accomplish. The air reservoir theoretically had air for 80 shots, but a round’s hitting power dropped off after 30. Wagons were eventually introduced to carry large air pumps that could recharge an entire platoon.

A transverse bar operated a spring that allowed a ball into the firing chamber from the magazine alongside the barrel. A single pull of the trigger caused the hammer to push a pin that opened a check valve of air in the buttstock, releasing exactly the right amount to power a round.

The magazine could be discharged in thirty seconds and with a rapid reload tube it could be refilled in 10 seconds. The front cap of the magazine would be opened and the contents of a reload tube poured in. Each rifleman was issued a leather pack which contained four reload tubes, two charged air reservoirs, a pump and stand, ladle, bullet mold, and a ramrod. The ramrod was used for clearing jammed rounds. A jammed ball would be pushed down the barrel until it reached the spring loader; a push of the slide at a downward angle and inverting the weapon caused the round to obey the laws of gravity.

Unlike muskets of the day, the weapon could be reloaded while lying down. Like a musket, the weapon came with slings though it was too delicate to take a bayonet.

A Girardoni being fired made a snap sound: no louder than popping a paper bag.

Despite the advantages of rapid fire, no smoke, and little noise, there were sound reasons why so few were produced.

Governments wanted durable weapons that could be produced in large numbers at low cost and ones that were able to absorb plenty of soldierly abuse as well as function in the worst of weather. The Girardoni was expensive to manufacture because of the complexity of its design and because it required the services of highly skilled gunsmiths. The reservoir’s construction required a complex brazing process and the production of a delicate seal made of horn between the reservoir and the barrel.

The weapon was fragile and prone to breakdowns. Every unit needed a specially trained gunsmith to make even the most basic repairs: one gunsmith per hundred men. One officer complained in 1789 that a third of his unit’s weapons were inoperable after only two months. He went on to complain that it took an entire winter to get replacements. Air flasks were easily ruptured if mishandled and they sometimes exploded when exposed to bright sunlight for extended periods. The explosion of even one cylinder would naturally shake the confidence of a unit. Extreme cold also posed problems. A small leak in a reservoir rendered a weapon useless, and it was necessary to always keep the leather gaskets of the reservoir moist.

Training troops to use the Girardoni cost far more time and money than training a soldier in the use of a common musket. The governments of the day had little faith and trust in the diligence of the common soldier when given a high maintenance weapon. The tactical doctrine of the Napoleonic era was far more about massed firepower than precision firepower.

The Girardoni was a fascinating technological leap forward but like the equally fragile Ferguson Rifle of the American Revolution, it was a wonder weapon that was unsuited for a large army. It was clever rather than practical, and the second always triumphs over the first in warfare.

The specimen owned by Meriwether Lewis has variously resided at the U.S. Army War College and the Pentagon, and is now on display at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. It played a unique role in opening the American West, as it served a diplomatic function rather than a military one: calming tensions instead of enabling bloodshed. The Lewis and Clark Expedition did not lose a single man to hostile action and this weapon played a key role in that outcome. The master gunsmith who invented the Girardoni could never have foreseen that his creation would have its chief influence far beyond his Alpine home.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Danielski is the author of Attaché Extraordinaire as well as the Tom Pennywhistle series of novels about a Royal Marine officer in the Napoleonic Wars. He has several degrees, including one in history from the University of Minnesota. He is a Phi Beta Kappa and holds a black belt in tae kwon do. He has taught history at both the secondary and university levels and has worked as a newspaper editor. His literary mentors were C. S. Forester, Bruce Catton, and Shelby Foote. See him online at https://www.tompennywhistle.com/