Piasa Bird

In 1673 Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet saw two monsters painted on a limestone bluff above the Mississippi near present-day Alton, Illinois: as large as a calf, horned like deer, red-eyed, bearded like a tiger, covered in scales, with a tail that wound around the body and ended in a fish's tail. The journal gives them no name and no wings; both arrived later, and both can be dated. The word Piasa is in print as a place name on Hutchins's map of 1778 and as "Piesa" in Amos Stoddard's book of 1812. The legend of Chief Ouatogá, the twenty warriors and the poisoned arrows first appears in August 1836, on pages 101-102 of The Family Magazine, in an article signed "J. R." by John Russell of Bluffdale, who himself wrote "of course I do not vouch for its truth", later told William McAdams that his story had been "somewhat illustrated", and in 1847 printed a wholly different legend with a different hero. The rock was quarried away for lime in the mid-nineteenth century; when Francis Parkman passed in 1867 it carried a huge advertisement for Plantation Bitters. What stands on the Great River Road today is a modern mural, the latest in a chain of repaintings begun in 1924.

The bluffs that run east from the mouth of the Illinois River to Alton are a wall of limestone capped with sandstone, and in the summer of 1673 something painted on one of them stopped a canoe. The account is in the journal attributed to Jacques Marquette, printed by Reuben Gold Thwaites in volume 59 of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. "While Skirting some rocks, which by Their height and Length inspired awe," it reads, "We saw upon one of them two painted monsters which at first made Us afraid, and upon Which the boldest savages dare not Long rest their eyes. They are as large As a calf; they have Horns on their heads Like those of deer, a horrible look, red eyes, a beard Like a tiger's, a face somewhat like a man's, a body Covered with scales, and so Long A tail that it winds all around the Body, passing above the head and going back between the legs, ending in a Fish's tail." Green, red and black were the three colours. The passage ends: "Here is approximately The shape of these monsters, As we have faithfully Copied It." The drawing was made and the drawing is lost. Two monsters, then, not one — and no wings, no name, and no legend attached. Sieur de La Salle wrote in 1680 that "the monster a sketch of which the Sieur Jolliet brought back is a grotesque figure painted by some Indian of the river": the sketch that survived the journey was credited to Louis Jolliet, Marquette's companion, who is usually the first name to fall out of the story. In September 1687 Father Anastasius Douay and Henri Joutel reached the same place and came away unimpressed. Joutel counted "two scurvy Figures drawn in red, on the flat Side of a Rock, about eight or ten Foot high", and Douay wrote flatly that he "touched them without difficulty". In December 1698 Buisson de Saint-Cosme passed and recorded that the figures "are now almost effaced". Charlevoix came down the river in 1721 and said nothing about them at all. The name arrives separately from the picture. Thomas Hutchins's map of 1778 labels the ground where Alton now stands "Piasas". Major Amos Stoddard, writing in Sketches, Historical and Descriptive, of Louisiana (Philadelphia, 1812), reported that what Jolliet and Marquette "call Painted Monsters on the side of a high perpendicular rock, apparently inaccessible to man, between the Missouri and Illinois, and known to the moderns by the name of Piesa, still remain in a good degree of preservation" (p. 17). Whether anything was still visible is another matter: in 1824 Murray McConnel of Jacksonville examined the rock and later told John F. Snyder that he had seen nothing but "blotches of rusty-looking discoloration, such as stained the exposed faces of the cliffs generally". The legend has a date, a page and an author. In August 1836 The Family Magazine; or, Monthly Abstract of General Knowledge (vol. IV, Boston edition) carried on pages 101–102 an article headed "The Piasâ: An Indian Tradition of Illinois", signed only "J. R.". The volume's own prefatory Advertisement names him: "The Piasa," it says, was "obligingly furnished by J. Russell, Esq., of Bluffsdale, Ill." John Russell, a professor at Alton Seminary, wrote that the stream below the bluff was called the Piasa, that the word meant in the language of the Illini "the bird that devours men", and that on the cliff was "cut the figure of an enormous bird, with its wings extended". Then came the tale: a man-eating bird, whole villages depopulated, a chief named Ouatogá who fasted a moon, dreamed, offered himself as bait, and twenty warriors with poisoned arrows. Russell closed the legend with a line that almost everyone who repeats him drops — "Of course I do not vouch for its truth" — and followed it with his own excursion to a cliff cave whose floor, he said, was "a mass of human bones". The article travelled fast: reprinted in the Alton Telegraph on 28 September 1836, in the Sangamo Journal of Springfield on 15 October, carried by the Cincinnati edition of the magazine that same month, and reprinted again in the Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate of Utica, New York, in July 1848 — which is why several nineteenth-century writers, and some modern ones, misdate Russell to 1848. What almost nobody noticed is that in between, on 28 October 1847, Russell published in the Springfield Illinois Journal a completely different legend: the creature is a giant condor, the hero is not Ouatogá but a lone Illini named Alpeora who kills it single-handed, and the figure on the rock is admitted to be "now obscured by time". Questioned by William McAdams, Russell allowed that his story had been "somewhat illustrated". His son Spencer G. Russell told John F. Snyder that his father had confessed the legend was the product of imagination coupled with Marquette's account. The rock itself did not survive the century, and the sources do not agree on when it went. McAdams wrote in 1887 that "the whole face of the bluff was quarried away in 1846 and '47" (p. 9), yet a page earlier described a gradual quarrying for lime after 1844–45 with all traces gone about the time the Civil War began. Perry A. Armstrong, publishing the same year, said the rock was quarried by convicts of the Alton penitentiary "as late as about the year 1856". Francis Parkman settled at least the end of it: "In 1867, when I passed the place, a part of the rock had been quarried away, and, instead of Marquette's monsters, it bore a huge advertisement of 'Plantation Bitters'." What has hung on the bluffs since is a chain of copies of copies. On 4 October 1924 Herbert Forcade, an eighteen-year-old Boy Scout, presented a Piasa he had painted on the cliff to the city of Alton, dedicated the next day. I. H. Mawdsley, a Shurtleff College student, repainted it in 1935 with money raised by John D. McAdams, and restored his own work in 1938 in red and green instead of the yellow that had dominated. Jack Buese and Eldon Grove began a thirty-by-eighteen-foot version on 12 September 1952, dedicated on 12 October. In 1984 the Alton-Godfrey Rotary Club, unable to raise the $50,000 an aluminium panel would have cost, had a four-and-a-half-ton steel Piasa cut, painted by nine local artists over some 400–500 hours and craned onto the bluff at Norman's Landing; it was taken down in the 1990s and sold to Southwestern High School for one dollar. The painting on the rock today is later still.

The Piasa is free, roadside and open at all hours, and it is not what most visitors think they are looking at. Where. Piasa Park sits on the Great River Road (Illinois Route 100) a short drive west of downtown Alton, Illinois, with a small parking area and picnic shelters at the foot of the bluff and the painting on the rock face above. There is no gate, no ticket and no opening time. Alton is about 18 miles (29 km) north of St Louis; the nearest airport is St Louis Lambert. The area tourism body is the Great Rivers & Routes Tourism Bureau, 200 Piasa Street, Alton, Illinois 62002, +1 618-465-6676. What you are seeing. A modern painting on a cut face of limestone, in the winged dragon form popularised by the drawing McAdams published in 1887 — the descendant of the 1924, 1935, 1938 and 1952 versions, and of the steel bird of 1984. The tourism bureau dates the present image only to "the 1990s"; local accounts give 1996 or 1998, and I could not fix the year in a document, so treat any precise date you are told on site with caution. Limestone holds paint badly, so the colours fade and the touch-ups are irregular: expect a weathered image rather than a fresh one, and note that in 2023 the tourism bureau said it would not repaint the bird as part of the park project. What is not there. The rock Marquette described is gone. It stood several hundred yards downstream, at the eastern end of the bluff chain by present-day downtown Alton, and it was quarried away for lime in the middle of the nineteenth century; by 1867 the surface carried a whisky advertisement. No original pigment survives anywhere, and there is no cave to visit: Russell's cavern full of human bones rests on Russell's word alone, and the bluffs he described have been reworked by quarrying, road-building and the river ever since. Practical warnings. Route 100 is a fast two-lane road pinned between the cliff and the Mississippi. Use the parking area; do not stop on the shoulder or walk the verge for a photograph. The bluff sheds rock, so do not climb it or scramble above the shelters, and do not cut through the gardens of the houses that back onto it. The best light on the mural is in the afternoon, when the face is not in shadow. Plans that changed. In March 2023 the Great Rivers & Routes Tourism Bureau announced a redevelopment of Piasa Park including a 4,500-square-foot visitor centre and an observation deck, funded from a state byway grant. That did not happen at Piasa Park: on 4 November 2024 the bureau announced that land ownership and tax liabilities had made the site unfeasible and that the Byway Discovery Center would instead be built further west along the Great River Road near Piasa Creek, on the Madison–Jersey county line, aiming to open in spring 2026. Check the current state of the works before planning around a visitor centre. Nearby. The Alton Museum of History and Art, in Loomis Hall at 2809 College Avenue, is the obvious local stop, but listings have marked it closed since 2020 and I could not confirm a reopening; ring before you go.