In frontier historical novel River with No Bridge, Nora Flanagan, at age eighteen, leaves Boston in 1882 to marry a miner in Butte, Montana. She anticipates achieving the respectability and security denied her as a tinker's daughter in Ireland. Instead, she experiences tragedy, disgrace, and redemption. Three men love her: her husband who dies in a mine explosion; the secretive gambler who abandons her, leaving her pregnant; and half-Chinese Jim Li who becomes her life partner despite prejudice against them. In the course of her life, Nora survives her daughter's death, relinquishes her son, homesteads in the wilderness, and raises a Blackfeet girl. She learns to cherish the beauty and healing power of nature surrounding the North Fork of the Flathead River.