Lewis and Clark air rifle

[hminsky]

http://www.lewis-clark.org/content/content-channel.asp?ChannelID=300

This is really interesting. Lewis and Clark brought with them an air rifle on their expedition. This site has some great animations of how the thing worked. It is so elegant , it makes gunpowder and cartridges look kind of crude, actually.

There is a funny entry at the end

The last time the air gun made the journals was Monday, 11 August 1806, the day Cruzatte mistook the buckskin-clad Lewis for an elk and shot him in the buttocks.6 Immediately suspecting a hostile Indian attack, Lewis hobbled back to the white perogue and, he wrote, "prepared my self with a pistol my rifle and air-gun being determined as a retreat was impracticable to sell my life as deerly as possible." At last, he was prepared to use the weapon for the main purpose it may originally have been designed to serve not merely for show, nor for hunting, but for man-to-man combat. It was a false alarm, of course. Lewis documented the incident in detail, conceding at last, "I do not beleive that the fellow did it intentionally."