Approximately 35 million Canadians and Americans inhabit the cities, towns, and villages ringing the Great Lakes, and most of those souls take the lakes for granted. This is a pity, because lakes Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and Ontario are the lifeblood of those communities. Together, the inland seas hold the greatest volume of fresh water on earth, and the forests, and deposits of copper, silver, and gold on and beneath their shores are the source of incalculable wealth on both sides of the international border.

In The Great Lakes, Pierre Berton offers his take on the lakes’ early explorers, fur traders, and voyageurs; describes shipwrecks, naval battles, and devastating storms; and paints vivid pictures of the harsh frontier-like conditions that prevailed during the frenzied logging, mining, and canal-building decades of the 19th century. The canals spawned an era of unprecedented prosperity in North America, but that growth had dramatic environmental consequences.

As Berton notes, the present-day lakes are entirely different creatures from what they were 200 years ago. Non-native aquatic species such as zebra mussels and sea lampreys – dumped into the lakes from the holds of canal-going foreign cargo ships – have irreversibly altered the lakes’ ecology and devastated some fisheries, as have dozens of toxic industrial and agricultural chemicals that pollute the waters.

Many Great Lakes urban waterfronts are jammed with factories and railyards, not lined with walkways and bicycle paths. Still, islets of hope remain in the form of hundreds of state, provincial, and national parks, and in citizen activists who lobby slow-moving governments to clean the lakes up.

All of this makes for an absorbing story, and here it’s well told. The Great Lakes is an attractive volume enlivened by Berton’s colourful, idiosyncratic prose, by well-chosen archival photos and paintings, and by Andre Gallant’s handsome photographs of wilderness scenes and city life.