7/30/25 Report - Oldest Firearm Found in U.S. Did You Know Lewis and Clarke Used an Air Gun? Another Research Tool.

Written by the Treasureguide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.

In 1540, Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado set off from what is now central Mexico and entered the United States through southern Arizona in his search for the fabled “Seven Cities of Gold” in the American Southwest. Ultimately, the Coronado expedition traveled as far north as Kansas before returning to Mexico City in 1542. In a groundbreaking discovery that will change the history books, an abandoned town that Coronado established in 1541 along his route has recently been found in the Arizona desert. Wind and rain had erased all obvious traces of this town over time, but one of Coronado’s six wall guns was recently found at the site, where it was lost in a battle 480 years ago with the local natives, the Sobaipuri O’odham, irrigation farmers who lived in permanent settlements along most of the rivers in southeastern Arizona. It is they, not the Ópata as scholars have thought, who repulsed the Spaniards at this early date.

The Coronado gun is the oldest firearm ever found inside the continental United States and is also the first firearm found from this roughly 2,500-person expedition...

A Conquistador’s Cannon Unearthed | An Official Journal Of The NRA

Ngram Viewer Chart of Relative Frequency of the Names Mel Fisher (blue) and Art McKee (red) a Large Body of Publications between 1950 and 2022.

Yesterday I talked, among other things, about AI usefulness for detectorists.  Today I'm taking a look at another tool - Google Ngram Viewer.

Google Ngram Viewer is a tool that analyzes the frequency of words or phrases (n-grams) in a vast collection of digitized books from Google's library, spanning from 1800 to the present. It generates graphs showing how often specific terms appear in these texts over time, reflecting trends in language use, culture, or historical interests.

Above is a chart showing the relative frequency of "Mel Fisher" and "Art McKee" in publications from the period 1950 up to 2013. You can see that Art McKee was in the literature from about 1950. Mel Fisher was frequent in the literature later but reached much higher level of publicity.

There would naturally be a slight lag between the events and the time they appear in publications, but Ngram analysis gives you a decent timeline. I've long been interested in linguistic changes. While I'm interested for other reasons, linguistic tell something about the timing of historical events and changes.

I queried Grok about the what appeared to me to be some obvious errors Ngram Viewer. When I saw the chart for the terms "UFO" and "UAP" showing those terms being used in centuries old publications, I thought that was very unlikely, so I queried Grok on the errors. Below is Grok's response.

Retronyms and Backdated Terminology: The term "UFO" was coined in the 1940s by the U.S. Air Force to describe unidentified aerial phenomena. However, older texts discussing strange aerial sightings might have been retroactively indexed or annotated with modern terms like "UFO" in digital databases. This can cause n-gram viewers to show apparent usage before the term was officially coined.

OCR Errors and Misinterpretations: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, used to digitize old books and newspapers, can misread text. For example, abbreviations, acronyms, or similar letter combinations (e.g., "VFO" or "U.F.O." as a different phrase) in 19th-century texts might be misidentified as "UFO" by the software.

Besides errors produced by the Ngram procedures, there is the matter of context. For example, the word output was used fairly frequently in the 1800s in contexts having nothing to do with computers. So you have to consider the various usages and changes in the use of the term. Nonetheless, Ngram Viewer can provide clues to the timing in historical events corresponding to changes in word usage.

Below is a chart that shows the relative frequency of "buried treasure," "treasure hunting" and "metal detecting." That is the order of the lines, top to bottom.

So you can see that buried treasure was a term used frequently all the way back to 1800 and beyond. Treasure hunting being more modern in its usage and metal detecting only becoming common in the 1940s. That is pretty much what you might expect. One thing that interests me, though, is the dip in published references to "buried treasure," dropping to a peak in 1980. "Treasure hunting" shows a similar dip. It appears that the two dips are related, with the one slightly lagging the other. Metal detecting shows a relatively steady increase, but also maybe a little later and less pronounced dip.

Searching "metal detector," "buried treasure," "treasure hunting" and "metal detecting," and shortening the timeframe to 1900 on, I got the above.

As you can see buried treasure, which is a term that was used earlier than metal detector peaks about the same time as the term "metal detector."  I can't account for the drop or leveling off of the two terms right

 around or a little after 2010.

 

Those two nouns are used more frequently than the two activities described as treasure hunting and metal detecting.  There are several possible interpretations, but metal detecting is a subset of treasure hunting, so it is not very surprising that the more specific term is less frequent.

That leaves a lot to speculate about, but ngram viewer is a tool that might help you assess the timing and popularity of things in history.  For example, if you found an old bottle, such as Coca Cola, and wanted to know how old it might, of course you could look up its history, since it is an extremely popular brand, but an Ngram Viewer chart would show you when it became common in the published materials of the day.

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Below is something that really surprised me. I

History of Air Rifles for All the Nerds Out There

The first airgun can now be found in a museum in Stockholm and consisted of bellows being pumped to fire small projectiles. Beginning in the 17 century, air guns utilizing .30 to .51 caliber projectiles were used to hunt game such as boar and deer. Air rifles of this time period largely used some type of charging pump, such as bellows, to fill a reservoir with air and a trigger mechanism to unleash all of this pent-up air all at once, launching projectiles at velocities never before seen. Some ancient air guns were capable of 1000 feet per second (FPS)!

It was quickly realized that air guns had distinct advantages over other firearms such as the ability to be discharged in rain, unlike the matchlock and flintlock pistols. This quickly gave air rifles their place in warfare where they were used to quietly engaged enemies. Air rifles also took significantly less time to reload and didn’t have to be serviced and cared nearly as much as other firearms.

Primitive firearms were simply no match for a well-made air rifle of its time! The most commonly recognized combat air rifle is the Girandoni Air Rifle.

Countries such as France and Austria even had entire sniper units wielding only high precision air rifles which were called “Windbüchse” which means wind rifle In German. These rifles were designed by a famous watchmaker named Tyrolean in 1768. These rifles were roughly 4 feet long and weighed a little less than 10 pounds which put them close to the size and weight of a musket. They were the first to feature removable air reservoirs and could hold 22 .51 caliber lead balls. These could easily penetrate over inch-thick wooden boards, which puts their effective damage close to modern 9mm and .45 ACP pistols.

Roll up to 1804 and our best friends Lewis and Clark were touting air guns that shot .46 caliber lead balls while they explored the mysterious western world! That’s right, all of those photos you see of L and C riding around packing heat were actually air rifles!

The first commercially mass-produced air guns were manufactured in Plymouth, Michigan by the Markham Air Rifle Company. Their first model, which was a huge hit with hunters and explorers of the time was named the “Wooden Challenger” and was available to the public in 1886...

Here is the link for the rest of the story.

Oppps.  Can't find that link again, but think it is in americanrifleman.0rg. 

Here is something similar. Airgun History - AirGun Expert

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No action on the National Hurricane Center map and nothing new with the surf or beach conditions for the Treasure Coast.

I jumped the gun on the tenth anniversary of the 1715 Fleet 300 Anniversary find. You'll have to go back a few posts to find that one.

Or, here is my original post. Remember, then I had to wait for the official announcement.

The Treasure Beaches Report Direct From Florida's Treasure Coast.: 8/19/15 Report - YOU WON'T BELIEVE THIS! New Treasure Finds From The Treasure Coast - Just Released.

Good hunting,

Treasureguide@comcast.net