The petroglyphs were each about 30 feet in length and 12 feet in height. Father Jacques Marquette (1637–1675), the celebrated Jesuit priest-explorer, mentioned the strange petroglyphs in his journals of the Mississippi, published in Paris in 1681. In a small volume published in 1698, Father Louis Hennepin (1626–after 1701), another early explorer of the wilds of the west, had also described the two enormously large petroglyphs. In his 48-page booklet The Piasa or the Devil Among the Indians (Morris, Ill., 1887), P. A. Armstrong described the creatures as having “the wings of a bat, but of the shape of an eagle’s…They also had four legs, each supplied with eagle-shaped talons. The combination and blending together of the master species of the earth, sea, and air…so as to present the leading and most terrific characteristics of the various species thus graphically arranged, is an absolute wonder and seems to show a vastly superior knowledge of animal, fowl, reptile, and fish nature than has been accorded to the Indian.” Whatever the petroglyphs truly represented, all the native tribes of what then constituted the Northwest Territory had a terrible tradition associated with the creatures they called the Piasa (or Piusa).
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 04:54:45 +0000