Juniata, River of Sorrows

Juniata, River of Sorrows tells the story of McIlnay’s love of the Juniata, which began when his grandfather took him fishing on the river at the age of 13. “Since reading Huckleberry Finn as a boy,” McIlnay explains, “I had dreamed of floating the entire Juniata in a single summer.”

In this adventurous book, this modern-day Huck Finn fulfills his dream – and that of many others – of floating the length of an American river. But Juniata, River of Sorrows is much more than the story of one man’s journey on a river. It is a stirring book of remembrance and research, a documentary of McIlnay’s trip down the river and a portrait of some of the Juniata’s most interesting people and important events.

A master storyteller, McIlnay brings history alive with eyewitness accounts from the Pennsylvania frontier as well as rare maps and journals from explorers and missionaries and little-known documents from the Pennsylvania Archives. McIlnay takes readers back in time to:
The Onojutta-Haga Indians, the first known inhabitants of the Juniata Valley The founding of Pennsylvania by William Penn The defrauding of the Lenni Lenape Indians by the Pennsylvania government The torture and murder of 3,000 colonists in the Juniata Valley The massacre at Fort Granville on the Juniata The destruction of the Indian town of Kittanning by the Pennsylvania Regiment The life of the “Wild Hunter of the Juniata,” a man named “Captain Jack.”

260pp., paperback, index, biblio., $14.95