It began with Chance Woodhull -- a pioneer farmer in Indiana, a home-steader who could do everything that needed to be done, superlatively. And one of those things was to make whiskey each September -- a barrel from ten bushels of surplus corn. It was good whiskey and he passed his skill on to his sons. But he could not foresee in those golden days on the frontier, just before the Civil War, what effect his teaching would have on the lives of his children and his children's children. Water of Life is his story and theirs -- a huge portrait in action of American people and places. In its inspired storytelling of three American generations, it covers the full scope of man's posibilities for good and evil and the battles that each generation must fight for itself.