The Tale of the Piasa Bird

By Sam Moore
Published on February 25, 2013
article image
Photo Courtesy Sam Moore
A modern reproduction of the Piasa bird painted on a cliff above the Mississippi River just north of Alton, Ill.

From 1666 until his death in
1675, French Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette, better known from our grade
school history books as “Pere Marquette,” ministered to natives around the
western Great Lakes in the part of the new world then called “New France.”
Members of the local Illinois tribe told the
French of a large river that flowed south and, hoping it would prove to be a

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