A monster recorded by Marquette in 1673, repainted on the bluff
On the limestone bluffs above the Mississippi at Alton, Illinois, near the mouth of the Illinois River, Native artists once painted a creature that Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet recorded on their voyage down the river in 1673. They described a multicoloured beast with a human face and a long tail ending in a fish-like fin, and a copy of their sketch survives on maps by the cartographer Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin from 1678 and 1681. Marquette wrote that his Illini canoe paddlers knew the painting was coming up and were frightened of it. The rapids and swift currents at the confluence made it a dangerous stretch of river, and the Illini paddlers of a later missionary, Father de St. Cosme, left offerings there.
The archaeologist Mark J. Wagner of Southern Illinois University thinks it probably dated from the Mississippian period, AD 1000 to 1500, and showed a spirit being of three worlds. Its long serpent or fish tail tied it to the Underworld, its spotted, panther-like body and antlered head to this world, and the wings that some accounts from the early 1800s describe to the Upper World. It was dangerous rather than evil, because it held so much spiritual power. Many researchers identify it as the underwater panther of native lore, the mishipeshu of the Ojibwe, and stress that Marquette's party never mentioned wings.
The name and the bird came later. Piasas appears on Hutchins's map of 1789 as a label on the bend of the river, and the painted monsters were being called piesa by 1812. In 1836 the writer John Russell published a tale of a huge man-eating bird killed by the chief Ouatoga, who was protected by a divine invisible shield. The historian Wayne C. Temple, in the most comprehensive account of the creature in 1956, judged the Ouatoga story to be Russell's fiction rather than genuine folklore, and the famous winged sketch to be William McAdams's own reconstruction.
The face of the bluff that held the painting was quarried away, around 1846 or 1847 by McAdams's account and in the 1850s by others. A 20th-century replica based on the famous drawing now looks over the river from a bluff in Alton several hundred yards upstream of the original, and because the limestone is unsuited to holding an image it has to be restored regularly. The Illinois State Historical Society put up a plaque at the site in 1984.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
