ALTON, Ill. (First Alert 4) - An iconic painting with centuries of history sits on the riverside bluffs in Alton, Illinois. The story of Piasa Bird dates back to French explorers in the 1600s.
The first recorded writing of the Piasa Bird comes from a 1670s journal entry by French explorer Jacques Marquette. Marquette, along with Louis Joliet, was traveling the Mississippi River when they came across the painting on the bluff of what will later become Alton.
Marquette described the painting as a beast with wings like an eagle, the body of a lion, the claws of a bird of prey, with a snake's tail, antlers on its head and the face of a man.
The original painting that Marquette described has been lost. It was destroyed in the 1840s due to the quarrying of limestone. However, since Marquette's time, the Piasa Bird has been repainted and has become an icon in modern Alton.
In the 1830s, over a century and a half after Marquette's journal entries were written, a writer in Alton decided to come up with a story about the painting to entertain his readers.
"So, he just made the whole thing up," Troy Taylor, an author and expert on local urban legends, who is based in Alton, said.
According to the Illinois State Historical Society, the writer was John Russell.
Taylor said that Russel wrote about a Native American chief whose people had been going missing. That chief found the cause of the missing people was the Piasa Bird.
"Well, now [the Chief] knew it was this monster who was preying on his people, so he sought a vision of how to get rid of it," Taylor recounted of the story. "And he came up with an idea of offering himself as bait, standing on the top of the bluff, and he tied himself to some rocks. And so then, when the Piasa came in to grab a hold of him and carry him away, it gave enough time for the warriors in the tribe to come out of the woods and fill this thing full of arrows. And it crashed into the Mississippi River, was never seen again, and its likeness was painted on the bluff as a tribute to its ferocity."
Before Russell's story, the painting didn't have a name. In Russell's story, he borrowed the name of a creek that runs through Alton, called Piasa, which Russell said translates to "the bird that devours men."
"It doesn't," Taylor said. "It actually translates to water panther."
The Water Panther is a deity in several tribal nations across the plains and the Great Lakes area.
Regardless of the origins of the painting, it has becomes a local legend in Alton. The painting is the mascot for Piasa High School, has been featured on local Boy Scout patches, on postcards and boxes of matches.
The painting has also inspired music. A composer named James Woodward wrote a piece named after the Piasa Bird, which was performed by an orchestra in the mid-1980s.
You can listen to the only digitized version of the song here on First Alert 4.