Yeah, I know where was I? I’ve been busy, like I’m never not busy… but sorry anyway….I’m back, ...okay?
As I said, I’ve been very busy. My dragon hunting husband pulled me off one thing I was doing and sent me back to chasing down a pile of rocks… yup, rocks ….you’d be surprised how hard that is… and how long it can take to catch up with such a thing … annoyingly long…
He’s been chasing the same pile of rocks… about four hundred years later… the same pile of rocks we were chasing six years ago not too long after we started in on all this… a VERY tediously ellusive pile of rocks … obviously….
Just about six years ago, soon after started chasing down the REAL story behind the Piasa, we found something quite remarkable… something which, as usual, everybody “knew” didn’t exist and could not possibly ever be found…
We had found a picture of the Piasa … well, most of it anyway… or at least what was left of it just before it was destroyed.
It had been painted between 1840 and 1850 by Henry Lewis. What my husband found on the internet was a picture of a picture of his picture…
see, I told you this is tedious…
Mr. Lewis turned his series of paintings illustrating scenes from the Upper Mississippi Valley Region into a set of lithographs, and he turned those lithographs into a book which he then sold to a publisher in Dusseldorf who wanted to interest Germans in immigrating to the USA who gave it the brilliant title…
Das Illustrite Mississippithal
(meaning The Mississippi Valley Illustrated, I told you the man was brilliant)
And then, it gets even more tedious and convoluted …
That book of lithographs was later re-published in the USA in the 1960’s …
yes, this keeps on going and going, just like the energizer you-know-who …
and then somebody found the lithograph with the Piasa in it and put it on the internet …
in a kinda blurry way…
drat screen resolution issues…
And along came us…
That’s when we started chasing that blasted (literally) pile of rocks…
My husband, along with Irish and Quint (remember them, look a day or two back if you you don’t, they’re nice guys) loaded up in Irish’s SUV (big, but not big enough to take me and our two youngsters along (4 & 9 years, respectively at that time) and reach our destination without justifiable homicide reducing the number of souls on board by several by entirely justifiable homicide (trust me, I may love my kids but even I am attest that it WOUD have been more than justifiable after the first three miles, probably sooner…)
The three of them headed out to match the location of the Piasa in the Lewis lithoraph with what remained after its destruction.
They drove to Alton.
No match, nothing even close… then they kept going … northward…
They found the spot…you can see it on satellite, I just went there on Monday, virtually … Google Earth has an awesome view of the spot from both orbit and from ground level on the Great River Road …
The accounts we could find said that the Piasa had been blasted out of existence and the stone rubble had been quarried for building materials …
There was only one place along the banks of the Mississippi in that general area that fit that description, and it was just outside Elsah, Illinois …
BULLSEYE… they had it. And, we had a location. And the location and lithograph matched … perfectly.
And when we made our second trip (yes, “we,” as in including ME the second time, huzzah), we found lots of proof that we were right, alas, that trip would be a few months later, after the Elsah museum opened for the Summer…
But that is a story for next time …
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