4 Mark Nickless – Piasa Bird Monster

Mark Nickless – Piasa Bird Monster

Copywrited 2004 by Mark Nickless
for publication in Fall 2004 issue
OUTDOOR GUIDE MAGAZINE

PIASA BIRD MONSTER PLUCKED
Here There Be Dragons?

“While Skirting some rocks,”  Father Marquette wrote,  “which by Their height and length inspired awe, 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 large As a calf; they have Horns on their heads Like those of a 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 are the three Colors composing the Picture.  Moreover, these 2 monsters are so well painted that we cannot believe that any savage is their author; for good painters in france would find it difficult to reach that place Conveniently to paint them.  Here is approximately The shape of these monsters, As we have faithfully Copied it.”

Sadly, Marquette’s original sketches were lost when his canoe sank in treacherous rapids near Montreal.   Over time, the Piasa weathered and faded.  In the early nineteenth century, several attempts were made to repaint them, but these efforts were fanciful, and in no way faithful to the original.  The final indignity came sometime in the 1850s, when the site was quarried.  The Piasa were utterly destroyed.

In place of facts, legends evolved.  Ones which  became greatly embellished as time passed.   In 1836, Professor John Russell wrote an imaginative article that transformed the two monsters of the Piasa painting into one  “Bird That Devours Men”.  In this manufactured “myth”,  the newly fledged Piasa  destroyed Indian villages and ate their inhabitants — a sort of Paleolithic Rodan.  It was eventually  destroyed by Ouatoga, a clever chief of the Illini tribe, who bravely used himself as bait to lure the Piasa within the range of his braves’ poison arrows.

Russell’s fantasy  utterly  ignored Marquette’s original description of two scaly creatures, neither of which was described as winged.  Yet, in this new fantastical form, the Piasa became Alton’s claim to fame, a local mystery who’s origin has been obscured by romantic  nineteenth century disinformation—until now.   For I believe that I  have uncovered the real identity and history of the Piasa.

The answers came unexpectedly, through a series of seemingly unrelated events that proved to be the pieces to the puzzle.

The first piece of the puzzle came during a chance channel-surfing viewing of C-Span 2.  Royal Navy submarine Commander, Gavin Menzies retired, was speaking about his new book, 1421: The Year China Discovered America.   In 1421: The Year China Discovered America,  Menzies, an expert navigator,  makes a startling claim, at least to Westerners.  After exhaustive research of Chinese records, maps, and other discoveries around the world, he reached  the following conclusions:

Four great Chinese fleets set sail in  March, 1421, under the Admiral Zheng He, and began to systematically explore the entire world, from the  northern tip of Greenland, within the Arctic Circle, southward to the equally frigid coast of Antarctica.  The fleets,  four-hundred-eighty- foot-long capital ships and ninety- foot auxiliaries, mapped nearly the entire world in their quest for power and treasure   This great and costly achievement  would have enabled China to dominate the globe, if not  for an unimaginable disaster.

On May 9, 1421, a scant three months after launch of the fleets, lightning struck the newly constructed Imperial Palace in Beijing,  burning it to the ground, with great loss of life.  The Emperor,  Zhu Di,  tearfully concluded  he had offended the Gods by  building the fleets.  He had elevated himself above man’s place and failed to honor Heaven.   An edict was soon issued  prohibiting future voyages and   foreign travel.  When the  battered survivors (this was a perilous undertaking) of the fleets returned in October, 1423, they were treated as pariahs, not heroes.  Their great ships were destroyed; their maps, purchased at a fearful toll of human lives, were gathered up and burned (save for a precious few).   China then vanished as a player on the world stage for half a millennium.

The second puzzle piece was an article in the Leader, a weekly paper published in Jefferson County, Missouri.   I opened my copy one Thursday evening and saw an article about  the Piasa legend.  I read it, and then looked at the accompanying photograph.  It was a Piasa  replica that had been somewhat naively painted on a bluff near Alton, alongside the Great River Road..  With 1421: The Year China Discovered America fresh in my mind, the ersatz Piasa  struck me as some sort of dragon.   I read Marquette’s  description of the Piasa,  and realized that while it bore little resemblance to the modern depiction, it sounded even more Chinese than I had first imagined.

But really, could part of the great  Chinese fleet have traveled hundreds of miles up the Mississippi River?  Yet, 10 years ago,  I had heard rumors of Indian pictographs, somewhere locally, along the Mississippi,  that depicted sailing ships.   I needed more evidence.

A few days later, in an extreme example of synchronicity, a third puzzle piece fell into my lap in the form an unsolicited e-mail from an acquaintance of mine, who will remain unnamed.  He is an expert on languages.   Not only does he speaks fluent Chinese,  but he is an authority on Native American languages, and has self-published a dictionary of the Illini language.   He has a habit of sending stimulating linguistic tidbits to his circle of  somewhat eccentric friends.

Incredibly, the subject of this particular e-mail was the meaning of “Piasa”, which has  generally been held to mean “destroyer” or “devourer of men.”   However, his research  indicated that “Piasa”  actually referred to a “water elf” or “dwarf“…little people!.  For him,  this only deepened the mystery of the Piasa, for it did not fit neatly into his own theory of the Piasa’s origin.

To me, however, it was a revelation.  The thought occurred that the  “Piasa” could refer,  not to the beasts, but to their creators — small men.   (It must be kept in mind that the men of some local tribes, such as the Osage, averaged well over six feet in height — giants in their day.)   It struck me that the  Piasa beasts really were Chinese dragons.   They could have been painted by the Chinese explorers.

I told my wife, Laurie, about my speculation.  She quickly produced a Chinese  bracelet inscribed with dragons.  These were stunningly  similar to the good Father Marquette’s original Piasa description.

However, were the similarities sufficient to constitute a match?   To identify the Piasa as Chinese?  I  found this final piece of the puzzle while researching on the internet.  At .wikepidia.org,, an online encyclopedia, I found a detailed written description of the personal emblem of Huang Di, the near-mythical Yellow Emperor of China.   The symbol of this greatest of Emperors was the  lung, a distinctive composite beast, best described by westerners as a dragon.  It was the symbol of Imperial China for four thousand years.   Tantalized, I dove back into the internet and soon came up with several illustrations of Huang Di’s Imperial Dragon.

Bingo.   They were virtually identical to the original Piasa as described by Marquette.  In fact, there are, at minimum,   eleven identical features  in common between  Marquette’s  Piasa  and  Huang Di’s Imperial Dragon:

1. The Piasa is actually a pair of creatures, typical in a Chinese lung motif.
2. Both creatures have horns like deer.
3. Both have red fiery demon eyes.
4. Both have a beard or whiskers like a tiger’s.
5. Both are covered with scales.
6. Both are painted in green, red, and black.   These are Imperial colors and can be seen today on Chinese New Year’s dragons.
7. Both possess long, sinuous tails long enough to wrap around their bodies.
8. Both of their tails terminate in a fish’s tail.
9. Both have humanlike faces.  In Huang Di’s emblem, the face was that of a magical beast, the quillin,  traditionally depicted with  human-like facial features.
10. An absence of wings.  This would be unusual in a Western dragon.  Traditionally, however, many Chinese dragons flew without benefit of wings.
11. Both exhibited highly sophisticated execution, as good as any in France, what you would expect from the technically advanced Chinese.   No other pictographs are known that approach this level of  skill.