The LeMat “Grape Shot Revolver”: The Strangest Sidearm of the Frontier

JT wasn’t the only one of my characters who carried a LeMat. Klint in One Saint in Tonica carries one too, and it is his preferred weapon.

It may be the strangest sidearm of the whole frontier era.

Invented in New Orleans in the 1850s by Dr. Jean Alexandre LeMat and backed by his cousin, the future Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, the LeMat “Grape Shot Revolver” carried nine shots in its cylinder instead of the usual six. But the real trick was hidden in plain sight. The cylinder spun around a second, larger barrel underneath, a smoothbore that fired a load of buckshot like a short shotgun. Flip a lever on the hammer, and your extra “shot” became a blast of grape at close range.

It was heavy, complicated, and chambered for oddball calibers, so a man often had to cast his own bullets. Only around 2,900 were ever made, most smuggled through the Union blockade to the Confederacy, where officers like J.E.B. Stuart and Braxton Bragg carried them. Beauregard’s own engraved LeMat survives to this day in a Richmond museum.