Weekly Reader: Chasing Dragons: The True History of the Piasa Including Excerpts from To The Gates of Feng Tu Translated by Laurie Bonner-Nickless and Written by Mark Nickless and Laurie Bonner-Nickless; Fascinating Hidden History About Chinese Exploration of The Missouri-Illinois Area

 

Weekly Reader: Chasing Dragons: The True History of the Piasa Including Excerpts from To The Gates of Feng Tu Translated by Laurie Bonner-Nickless and Written by Mark Nickless and Laurie Bonner-Nickless; Fascinating Hidden History About Chinese Exploration of The Missouri-Illinois Area

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: It's amazing how a long awaited discovery could lead to a huge change in the history that we were taught in school. Who would have thought that a journal entry about a strange painting would lead to potential proof that Chinese explorers may have arrived and visited the Midwest decades before Spanish and Italian European explorers found their way to the Americas?

That's exactly what is discussed in Chasing Dragons: The True History of the Piasa Including Excerpts from To The Gates of Feng Tu Translated by Laurie Bonner-Nickless and Written by Mark Nickless and Laurie Bonner-Nickless. This is a fascinating study of a history that has been long hidden but now needs to be brought to light.

The search began when Mark Nickless read an article in his local newspaper, The Jefferson County Leader, that described a painting of two monsters called The Piasa on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River near St. Louis and discovered by Jesuit explorer Jacques Marquette in 1673. The painting's origin was a mystery to Marquette and to the Native Americans who traveled with him. 

Marquette described it as "large as a calf..horns on their heads like those of a deer…red eyes, a beard like a tiger's, a face somewhat like a man's, a body covered in scales and so long a tail that it winds all around the body, passing above the head and going back between the legs, ending in a fish's tail. Green, red, and black are the three colors composing the picture." Sounds very draconian doesn't it?

This article stirred a memory inside Nickless who saw a Book Talk on C-SPAN by Gavin Menzies about his book, 1421: The Year China Discovered America, detailing explorers from the Ming Chinese Dynasty that used a massive fleet of ships to map the world including North America. 

According to Menzies's book, the Emperor Zhu Di appointed Zheng He as admiral of his fleet. Zheng He was commanded in 1406 to explore the entire world. With a fleet of two hundred 480 foot long ships.and 90 foot auxiliaries, crewed by 27,000 sailors and soldiers, Zheng He traveled around the world seven times in twenty-eight years. During these voyages, Menzies wrote that Zheng He traveled from the southern tip of Greenland to Antarctica, even voyaging to the Americas in 1420-1421. They mapped the various voyages. Unfortunately, the Ming government issued an edict prohibiting all voyages. The ships were destroyed and all maps, charts, and records were gathered and burned.

Putting these two events together, Nickless and his wife, Laurie Bonner-Nickless, researched the description of The Piasa and realized that Marquette's description matched that of two dragons, two Chinese dragons. Did members of Zheng He's fleet find their way to the Missouri-Illinois area? The Nicklesses suggest that it's possible.

The Nicklesses compared Marquette's description to other literary depictions of Chinese dragons and the details matched perfectly. That particular pictograph style was known to Chinese artists but not by any local Native American tribe. (In fact, Marquette's Native American fellow travelers were as stunned and frightened as he was about the picture) nor did the creatures resemble any told in local myth and legends.  It is also worth noting that in Chinese legends, dragons are depicted as wise and benevolent creatures that represent good fortune and luck and are seen as symbols of the Emperor. The colors green, red, and black are also symbolic of the Chinese emperor.

Okay, one picture may not mean anything. It could be a coincidence, but upon further investigation, it was revealed that banker George M. Doherty discovered jade items in Piasa Creek in the 1880's. In 1924, banker E.W. Payne said that even a superficial examination of the Piasa could tell that they were dragons. 

To add to the mystery, an acquaintance of the Nicklesses who spoke Mandarin Chinese and several Native American languages interpreted the word "Piasa" to mean "little men." Considering many of the men of the local tribes, like the Osage, were over six feet tall, the word may not have been a description of the creatures but of the shorter men who painted them.

Not to mention that petroglyphs have been found in Jefferson County, Missouri which strongly resemble Chinese characters. One appears to spell out "Love is here." (Another is of particular interest to me because it is five miles north of Hillsboro which is near my hometown of De Soto, Missouri).

Another interesting link is Bonner-Nickless' discovery in Luo Mao Deng's writings of a walled city of people with peculiar head dresses that could be a description of the city of Cahokia and its tribe, a tribe that later disappeared leaving behind their legendary mounds. All of this is mostly circumstantial, but certainly paints a picture that Chinese explorers not only may have made their way to Missouri and Illinois but encountered the local natives and were determined to leave their mark.

However, not everyone agreed with the assessment that the Piasa was a dragon or of the Chinese influence. In 1836, Professor John Russell offered a different view of the painting, a view that unfortunately stuck in local consciousness way more than Marquette's original description did. His entries contained much exaggeration and moral teachings for a religious audience. Instead of two wingless dragons, he described a large winged bird that devoured humans. 

He made up a legend in which the bird would pounce upon human beings leaving skeletons in its cave until a chief sacrificed himself to end the monster's tyranny. In other words, Russell's description transformed a picture of what appeared to be a benevolent Asian dragon into a fearsome European draconian-like creature courtesy of cultural and religious assumptions about the magical mythical creatures.

It didn't help that the painting had been assaulted by gunfire many times and then the limestone bluff in which the painting was quarried for housing material. So no way of verifying the creature's original appearance. So the location of the original painting was thought lost. 

In 1925, a new version of the Piasa was painted above the Great River Road in Alton copied from a catalog illustration and no doubt inspired by Russell's version of the creature. 

It was this description of the Piasa that carried over into cryptozoological legends and was repeated by various sources (including a YA unexplained phenomena book that I previously read). 

Chasing Dragons is interesting from a historical and academic perspective as it describes the various steps that researchers take to find answers to their questions. It's a mystery or a treasure hunt in which the prize is a greater knowledge and understanding about our world. 

The Nicklesses did extensive research by scouting the area and reading local accounts to learn that the location of the original Piasa painting was in Elsah, Illinois,10.9 miles north of the redone Alton one. Bonner-Nickless located a guidebook from the 19th century of Elsah that clearly had "Piasa Bluffs" marked.

 This actually fits the timing since Elsah was founded in 1847 and structures made from limestone quarried beginning in 1852-1853, the same time that the original Piasa painting was destroyed to become a limestone quarry. This information, combined with a clear copy of "Der Piasa Felsen" or "The Piasa Rock", an 1847 illustration by Henry Lewis, provided the clues that the Nicklesses needed to determine the real subject and location of the Piasa painting.

The Nicklesses' book is an interesting account of how art and culture is changed, altered, interpreted, and sadly sometimes destroyed by those around them. This is particularly telling in the story of what happened to the original Piasa painting and why the history of Chinese explorers and their dragon friend has been largely unexamined.

One reason that Chinese exploration of the Americas in general and the origins of the Piasa specifically are not well known is because of the Ming Dynasty's destruction of information about Zheng He's voyages. Nickless writes, "If not for this unimaginable disaster, Zheng He's costly achievement would have enabled China to dominate the globe. So far no one can be certain why the Ming government did this. It is a mystery. Because of this ill-advised decision, China then vanished as a player from the world stage for half a millennium."

Thankfully, not every item was destroyed. One was a map dated 1428 showing part of North America's East Coast including the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This route would have taken Zheng He's fleet from Lake Michigan to Alton with a portage in the Illinois River which flows to the Mississippi River right where the original Piasa was located. The other possibility is that they made their way to the Caribbean, through the Gulf of Mexico into the Mississippi River. There is a strong Chinese presence in the Caribbean to suggest this. Marquette's description of the Piasa is the final piece of the puzzle that the fleet made it to the Midwest and to the Missouri-Illinois area.

Another reason that the Piasa and its artist/explorers are not more well known can be summarized in two unfortunate words: "Manifest Destiny" and two more words: "James Semple." Semple was an attorney, a Brigadier General in the Blackhawk War, an Illinois Supreme Court judge, confidant of Abraham Lincoln, and eventual U.S. Senator. He was also a true believer in expanding the U.S. territory to the Pacific Coast and the concept of Manifest Destiny.

 Semple took part in American expansion to Oregon and returned to Illinois in 1847 where the Piasa would have been seen by many, particularly on the steamboats which went up and down the Mississippi River every day, and had already appeared in Lewis' painting. With an already inflamed over exaggerated sense of "White Superiority" and fueled by the anti-Chinese immigration rhetoric of the day, the thought of visual evidence that the Chinese arrived in the area before Europeans was something that Semple would not tolerate.

In 1852, Semple purchased a riverfront property which he later named Elsah. He then advertised that if anyone could build a house, they would then get the deed. There was plenty of limestone that was quarried and other materials for the taking. The practically free land and housing was tempting. The people of Elsah got their land and homes. Semple got property, money, and changed history and the original Piasa was no more, painted over, forgotten, repainted, and remade. 

However, the story doesn't end there. Thanks to new historical emphasis on Zheng He's voyages, as well as books and articles like Menzies' and those written by the Nicklesses (including a history conference in Nanjing, China to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the beginning Zheng He's journeys), the history of the Chinese explorers and the remainders of their arrivals are finally being recognized and known to the world.

The Piasa and its creators would have long been buried in history if not for the curiosity, persistence, and research provided by scholars, historians, artists, authors, and particularly a determined couple from Jefferson County, Missouri who asked questions, looked up information, and peered through sources to find answers. Truly, It is a historical journey of draconian proportions.