Great Lakes Patrol assigned to operate against criminals who were ravaging the logging industry. These so called timber pirates conducted illegal cutting of timber on federal land and then smuggled the valuable commodity out of the area in order to sell it. The areas most affected were in the western Great Lakes region, along the coasts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota. Much of these forested areas controlled by the government were reserved for the building of new warships. The illegal timber trade centered on Chicago and Milwaukee. It was nearly as violent as the alcohol trade, which was carried out over the
Fountain of the Great Lakes he began to place greater emphasis on sculpture in the classes he taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, while simultaneously refining earlier allegorical. The fountain is Taft's response to Daniel Burnham's complaint at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 that the sculptors charged with ornamenting the fairgrounds failed to produce anything that represented the great natural resources of the west, especially the Great Lakes. In Spring 1902, Taft had assigned his students a work entitled "Spirit of the Great Lakes". Five women had molded individual figures in response to an assignment and joined them in a tiered