 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 group with an imagined waterflow from the containers that they held.