Piasa Bird

About the Piasa Bird

Enter the account of the Flying Dragon called the Piasa from the Illiniwek natives of Illinois. The earliest account of the Piasa was recorded in 1673 by Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary who founded Michigan’s first European settlement and mapped the northern portion of the Mississippi River Valley.

Before his team began their journey down the Mississippi in May of 1673, they were warned by the Menominee Indians that they would encounter “horrible monsters, which devoured men and Canoes together.” Sure enough, they soon discovered the massive portrait of the Piasa monster on a limestone wall, likely there as a warning to those traveling down the river. Later in 1825 a rendition of this portrait was made and titled, “FLYING DRAGON.” So whatever this creature was, they regarded it as having dragon-like features. Eleven years later, John Russell, a professor of Greek and Latin at Shurtleff College, recorded the Native American legend about the Piasa. Russel writes:

“The Piasa means ‘The bird which devours men’ in the Illini language. Near the mouth of the stream is cut the figure of an enormous bird, with its wings extended. Many thousand moons before the arrival of the pale faces there existed a bird of such dimensions that he could easily carry off in his talons a full‑grown deer. Having obtained a taste for human flesh he would prey on nothing else. He would dart suddenly upon an Indian, bear him off into one of the caves of the bluff, and devour him.

Such was the state of affairs when Chief Ouatoga fasted in solitude for the space of a whole moon, and prayed. On the last night, the Great Spirit appeared to him in a dream and directed him to select twenty of his bravest warriors. He concealed them to ambush the creature while he offered himself as bait, placing himself in open view. As he waited he began to chant the death‑song. The Piasa arose and darted down on his victim. Scarcely had the horrid creature reached his prey before every bow was sprung and every arrow was sent quivering to the feather into his body. The Piasa uttered a fearful scream that sounded far over the opposite side of the river and then expired. Ouatoga was unharmed. Not an arrow, not even the talons of the bird, had touched him. The Master of Life, in admiration of Ouatoga’s deed, had held over him an invisible shield.

Next there’s the dwelling place of the Piasa—a place known as the Bone Cave in Grafton, Illinois. This may be one of the most confirming factors of the Piasa Bird account. Russel and several others report accessing the cave where the Piasa bird lived and finding many human bones strewn about, and mixed together with animal bones.

Russel reports: “My curiosity was principally directed to the examination of a cave, connected with the above tradition as one of those to which the bird had carried his human victims. After a long and perilous climb we reached the cave, which was about fifty feet above the surface of the river. The roof of the cavern was vaulted, and the top was hardly less than twenty feet high. The shape of the cavern was irregular; but so far as I could judge the bottom would average twenty by thirty feet. The floor of the cavern throughout its whole extent was one mass of human bones, skulls, animal bones, and arrowheads were mingled in the utmost confusion. To what depth they extended I was unable to decide; but we dug to the depth of 3 or 4 feet in every part of the cavern, and still we found only bones.”¹

Think about this for a minute… what could explain a random assemblage of mixed animal and human bones better than a cave occupied by a massive flying predator like a pterosaur?

A corroborating report is provided by William McAdams, a geologist and curator of the State Museum at Springfield. In his 1887 book titled work Records of the Ancient Races in the Mississippi Valley, McAdams notes that the cave contained many bones—some of them human.²

Something’s going on here… First, the Jesuit explorers are warned by natives about a man-eating dragon that lives up the river, then they find a mosaic of the creature on a cliff face, followed by an 1825 drawing of the “flying dragon” portrait the early explorers likely viewed. Then there’s Russel’s detailed account of the native chief, followed by two independent testimonies of the creature’s lair being filled with human and animal bones all mixed together. While some may dismiss this multiple-century account as myth, it sure seems like a pterosaur fits the story well.

Our worldviews guide our perception of the past. The data suggests no clear evolutionary ancestors leading up to these magnificent creatures, their body plans are perfectly designed for flight—even more so in the world before the Flood, which is yet another confirmation of the Bible’s two world epochs.  Across the world we have too many accounts about these creatures with too many plausible details that are consistent across these stories. It’s no wonder the Native Americans highly regarded the Thunderbird and gave it such spiritual significance.

Check out our Thunderbird book that documents the leading thunderbird accounts from the Americas.

Footnotes

¹ Russel visited the cave in March 1836.

² McAdams’ team visited the cave 30 years prior to publishing the Races book in 1887, placing their visit in 1857, approximately 21 years after Russell’s visit.