Lewis and Clark Girandoni air rifle

I am not a gun nut, so I’m reluctant to post this, but it is kind of amazing. In researching a flintlock pistol for my upcoming book, Our Mutual Friends, I stumbled across the air rifle used by the Lewis and Clark expedition. I’ve always been a bit leery of the air rifle created by the blind German gunsmith Von Herder in The Adventure of the Empty House because I doubted the power of the weapon.

This recreation of Capt. Meriwether Lewis’ rifle shows I’m an idiot. This recreation has an air chamber that could be charged to 800psi and has a 21-round capacity, plus one in the chamber. It’s quite a lethal weapon and I wonder why it did not become standard issue, although the 1,500 strokes of the air pump might have had something to do with it, I suppose.

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Jennifer Petkus divides her time between writing Jane Austen-themed mysteries, creating websites for the dead, woodworking, aikido and building model starships. She has few credentials, having failed to graduate from the University of Texas with a journalism degree, but did manage to find employment at the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper as a cop reporter, copy editor and night city editor before the paper died in 1986. She has done little since. Her husband is the night editor at The Denver Post. Her best friend is a cop. She watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon live. She is the author of, Good Cop, Dead Cop: A Novel about the AfterNet. She’s writing the sequel, The Background Noise of Souls, and another AfterNet related story, Jane Austen’s Book Tour.

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