The Piasa Bird
Jacques Marquette wrote down what he saw on the bluff in 1673: two painted monsters, each about the size of a calf, with horns like a deer, red eyes, a beard like a tiger, and a tail wrapped around the body. Quarrying took that rock face away in the 1870s. What is on the bluff today was painted in 1998, on limestone that will not hold paint, and it is redone as the weather takes it.
Field Guide Entry
What Marquette recorded
Marquette and Louis Jolliet came down the Mississippi in 1673. His journal describes a pair of figures painted high on the rock above the river, large, horned, red-eyed, scaled, with a long tail passing over the body and between the legs. He wrote that good painters in France would find them hard to do well, and that the Illinois were afraid of them.
Nobody knows who made them or when. The journal is the record, and later European descriptions differ from it and from each other, which is what you would expect from people copying a copy.
Where the rock went
The original face was on bluffs north of what became Alton. Nineteenth century quarrying took the stone for building and lime, and the painted section went with it. The figures were gone before photography arrived to settle any of the arguments about them.
The story that came later
The name Piasa attaches to the image in the nineteenth century, and the tale most often told alongside it, a man eating bird destroyed when the chief Ouatoga used himself as bait, was written by John Russell in 1836 for a magazine. It was read as folklore afterward, and it is still repeated as if Marquette had recorded it. He did not. He described a painting.
The painting now
The current version went up in 1998 on a bluff face along the Great River Road, and it is bright, scaled, and gold where Marquette's was described as red, green, and black. The limestone here does not hold pigment well, so it gets restored on a cycle. Alton treats it as a civic object rather than an artifact, which is the honest way to treat a repainting of a lost thing.
Visiting Information
Free, outdoors, and visible any time there is light. There is a small parking area at the pull-off on the Great River Road just north of Alton, with interpretive signs, and the painting is on the bluff directly above it.
The road is fast and there is no sidewalk, so the parking area rather than the shoulder is the place to stop. The bluff face above is unstable and fenced in places, and there is nothing to climb to.
The Great River Road continues north through Grafton with river overlooks and eagle watching in winter, and the Alton visitor center down the road carries local material on the painting's history.
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