Piasa

The limestone runs pale and sheer above the Mississippi north of present-day Alton, and for the better part of two centuries a pair of monsters looked down from it. Each was about the size of a calf. Deer antlers rose from a face that was almost a man’s, set with red eyes and framed by a beard like a big cat’s. The body was armored in scales, and from it uncoiled a tail so long that it climbed over the head, ran the length of the spine, and ended between the legs in the fin of a fish. Painted in red, black, and green, the figures caught the afternoon light and held it. A traveler drifting the current in a bark canoe met their stare long before the town, the mill, or the ferry existed, and the meeting tended to still the paddle in his hands.

The first person to write any of this down was Jacques Marquette. In the summer of 1673 the missionary came down the river with Louis Jolliet, warned in advance of a dangerous stretch of water ahead, and what stopped him was not a rapid but paint. He judged the two monsters beyond the skill of the best painters in France, and doubted anyone would credit that the people of the river had made them. He set down their colors, their horns, their scaled length, and their winding tails, and then he passed on downstream. He recorded no wings. He recorded no name. The creatures on the cliff, for him, were simply there, older than his arrival and indifferent to it.

The name came more than a century and a half later, and it came from a writer. In 1836 John Russell of Bluffdale, Illinois, published a piece he called The Piasa, or The Bird That Devours Men. He told his readers that the painted beast was the Piasa, an Illini word meaning exactly that, and he gave it a story. In the time before the white man, the Piasa had grown fond of human flesh. It swept down from the bluff on great wings and carried off whole villages a person at a time, until the chief Ouatoga withdrew to fast and pray, and the Great Spirit showed him the way to end it in a dream. Ouatoga stood in the open as bait while twenty of his best warriors hid with poisoned arrows. The bird stooped for him; the arrows found it; the monster shrieked and died against the rocks. The people painted its likeness on the cliff so it would not be forgotten.

Russell later admitted he had made most of it up. The Illini language holds no word piasa meaning the bird that devours men; the nearest real term, in the neighboring Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo tongues, means simply cat. Ouatoga, the poisoned arrows, the fasting and the dream all belong to Russell’s inkwell rather than to any recorded Native tradition. What he could not invent was the painting itself, which had already unsettled Marquette a hundred and sixty years before, and it is the painting that keeps the question open.

Set the tall tale aside and the figure on the bluff starts to look familiar to anyone who knows the older art of the region. A horned, scaled, long-tailed creature with a cat’s face belongs to a being painted, carved, and cut into shell and copper across the Mississippian world: the Underwater Panther, Mishipeshu, master of the water below. These were the great powers of the deep, opposed in the sky by the Thunderbirds, and travelers made offerings to them before trusting a stretch of fast or treacherous water. The Alton bluffs stand above exactly such a stretch, near where the Missouri pours into the Mississippi and the current turns dangerous. A monster of the below-world painted over that water is not a puzzle. It is a warning, and possibly a prayer.

The wings are the tell. Marquette’s monster had none, and neither do most old underwater-panther images; the outspread wings that make the modern Piasa look like a dragon crept in with Russell’s man-eating bird and the artists who followed him. The older creature is better met low in the brown water at the foot of the cliff, antlered head barely breaking the surface, the long tail working beneath, waiting for a canoe to lose its nerve in the rip. That is the Piasa doing what it exists to do, and it does not need to fly to do it.

Its powers follow from where it lives. As the Underwater Panther it commands the river itself, raising the wave and the whirlpool, dragging the careless under, and its scales turn aside ordinary harm. As Russell’s Piasa Bird it trades the water for the air, strong enough to lift a grown warrior and carry him screaming to the rock. The weakness is the same in both readings, and it is an old shape in monster stories: the thing that cannot be beaten by force can be beaten by a trap. Ouatoga does not out-fight the Piasa. He offers it what it wants, holds still while it commits to the strike, and lets hidden archers put their arrows into the one moment when the creature is too busy killing to defend itself.

The original figures did not survive. Quarrymen cut the face of the bluff away for lime through the middle of the nineteenth century, and by the Civil War the last of the ancient paint was gone. What stands above the river today is a modern restoration, most recently repainted on a nearby rock face at the end of the 1990s, some forty-eight feet of red and black and gold. It has the horns and the beard and the coiling tail. It also has the broad outstretched wings that Marquette, looking straight at the real thing, never saw.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Piasa?

The Piasa is a horned, scaled monster from Native American tradition, painted on the limestone bluffs above the Mississippi River near Alton, Illinois. In popular legend it is a man-eating winged beast, but the original pictograph most likely represented an Underwater Panther, a powerful water spirit of the Mississippian cultures.

Who invented the legend of the man-eating Piasa Bird?

The story of the flesh-eating Piasa Bird was written by John Russell of Illinois in 1836, and he later admitted he had largely made it up. Russell also coined the claim that “Piasa” was an Illini word meaning “the bird that devours men,” which linguists reject, since no such word exists in the Illini language.

What did the original Piasa look like?

The earliest account, recorded by the missionary Jacques Marquette in 1673, describes two painted monsters the size of a calf, each with deer-like horns, red eyes, a tiger’s beard, a nearly human face, a scaled body, and a very long tail ending in a fish’s fin. Marquette’s description mentions no wings; the wings were added by later artists.

What do scholars think the Piasa really represents?

Many scholars identify the Piasa figure as an Underwater Panther, or Mishipeshu, a horned water spirit found throughout Mississippian and Great Lakes art. These below-world beings were thought to control rivers and drownings and stood in opposition to the sky-dwelling Thunderbirds, which fits the pictograph’s position above a dangerous stretch of the Mississippi.

Can you still see the Piasa today?

Yes, a painted Piasa can be seen on a bluff near Alton, Illinois, but it is a modern restoration. The original pictograph was destroyed when the bluff was quarried for limestone in the nineteenth century, and the current image, roughly forty-eight feet long, was repainted at the end of the 1990s.

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