Lewis and Clark brought an air rifle on their expedition, back in 1803-06, and now, a couple centuries later, Ian of Forgotten Weapons discusses the almost-semi-automatic non-firearm:
Apparently Girardoni and Girandoni were both accepted spellings of the designer’s name back in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Tyrol region (then part of the Habsburg lands), where, according to Grok, the area’s mix of Ladin, Italian, and German linguistic influences produced inconsistent transliterations of his name in contemporary documents and later accounts.