So much of the tortured ecological history of the American West has been played out in microcosm along the banks of the Blackfoot River in western Montana. Generations of abuse - from logging, grazing, mining, and now overdevelopment - have left this once vibrant waterway choked and gasping. And today a new threat looms: a massive gold mine hard by the river's edge.

Here is the biography of a river, and like the best of that genre, it resonates far beyond the life of its particular central character. In telling the river's story, Richard Manning takes us as far back as the Salish tribe, who first settled its valley, on through the years of nation building and the influx of new Americans migrating west, to the new settlers of the nineties - the well-monied urban refugees who bring with them their own brand of waste and destruction.

He carefully and eloquently chronicles the successive waves of cattle, of axes and chain saws, of bulldozers and dynamite that have bled the life from the river. This is also the story of gold, the lust for which is now the driving force toward what may be the river's ultimate demise. Finally, Manning offers a ground-level view of the battle currently raging in Montana to stop the mine and save the Blackfoot.