Juniata Sunset

As I was searching for pictures for yesterday's post, I ran across some particularly memorable scenes taken during sunset while driving along US 322 on the banks of the lower Juniata River in central Pennsylvania.  I've been through there several times, and while the area is pretty lovely during the day, it is absolutely stunning at sunset.  In the last post I mentioned that Pennsylvania has its share of farmland and open fields, but the Juniata is Pennsylvania in a more primal form.  Much of the river area is forested, and even though the valleys have featured settlement of both Iroquoian peoples and colonials, it was a staging area and frontier area, respectively. 

Daytime, July of 2011.

Like many rivers in the region, the Juniata allowed for easy connections between the Appalachian interior and the Atlantic coastal lands, and the river is notable for being oriented east-west, like the Potomac, rather than north-south like most of the other waterways.  In addition to long since providing the First Born with connections to the interior, it provided early drive for colonial explorers wanting to press further west into the otherwise difficult terrain of the Appalachians.  Pennsylvania's lower easy Atlantic facing lands penetrated pretty far inland; Chambersburg, for instance, is halfway west into the state.  The Juniata, which is thirty miles north, provided a tempting path to get lost on.  Canals and Railroads would later follow, notable the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal, which bridged the Allegheny divide by means of a portage railroad.  Dear portage nps site, I regret not stopping there last summer!  


The canals and railroads ultimately never dominated those in New York or along the National Road route, the former a path the Haudenosaunee were also keen not only on maintaining, but also settling as the heart of their confederacy.  Colonial peoples were also more keen on moving on to the Ohio country; the Juaniata was the scene of frontier settlement in the early 18th century, but the area remained sparsely populated and is still very much verdant and sylvan to this day.  In some ways, its not hard to see why.  Typical of regional rivers, the river cuts through the imposing ridges of the Appalachians, and in some places the slopes come right down to the water's edge.  Dense riparian forests of willows and friends cover the shores, things are rather rapid and rocky in the river itself, and the upland forests have thick underbrush of rhododendrons and other typical Appalachian plants in many places.  Like the canyons of southern California, the Juniata and other regional valleys can provide for some very natural America not far from densely populated America.  The sense of passage and frontier is still very much obvious, especially when the sun disappears over the western horizon. 

And since I did label the post as such...

July 2014.

Hope you enjoyed it!  Sorry for blabbering on so much, but the colonial era frontier has always been very interesting to me.  It easily gets lost behind the later romance of the distant western frontier, and is often ignored by intelligent people otherwise trying to rediscover how the relationships between native and colonial peoples evolved in the middle stages of the modern American story.