Bad Lands

certain regions in the West remarkable for the way in which the country has been cut into gullies, leaving tables, pinnacles, and cliffs, often of fantastic shape and considerable height. Pillars of hard clay capped by sandstone are of typical occurrence. The cutting has been done by water, but, through lack of rain, the face of the country is now undergoing change very slowly. The principle areas that go by that name lie in Wyoming and western Dakota. The Bad Lands of the upper Cheyenne and White rivers are perhaps the most remarkable. The traveler going westward on the Northern Pacific enters the Bad Lands shortly before reaching Medora. Theodore Roosevelt lived here for some time. He gives a vivid account of the Bad Lands in his Ranching in the Far West.

We make room for a few extracts from a very interesting account of the Bad Lands of South Dakota written by Mr. N. H. Barton for Scribner's Magazine:

Among the most notable but least known wonders of our far west are the Big Bad Lands of South Dakota. They are a portion of the great central plains lying east of the Black Hills, and are remote from settlements and lines of communication. They are rarely reached by sightseers and the great tides of transcontinental travel sweep far to the north and south. The region has long been famous as a collecting ground for students in quest of fossil bones, and thousands of fine specimens have been obtained for museums in all parts of the world. The bad lands do not present mountains or chasms, woodlands or meadows, but a wilderness of rugged forms of moderate height carved in soft light-colored rock. There is endless variety in the configuration and the spectacle is a wonderful one, as it lies glittering in the bright western sunlight. Most of the surface is bare of vegetation, and as the area is several thousand square miles, the panorama stretches as far as the eye can reach.

There are walls and pinnacles, ridges and towers, carved by the rain and wind-blown sand into forms of great beauty and endless variety. Viewed from high points much of the region presents the aspect of a great ruined city of antiquity, built of materials of pale tints of pink, cream, buff, and green. Great castles with buttressed walls, pinnacles and towers abound, but crumbling and broken and in confusion of arrangement. High bare walls extend for miles, notched with amphithedral alcoves and sustained by elaborate buttresses. The highest features rise from 250 to 500 feet above the valleys. Many deep canyons extend into the bad lands which are walled by precipitous cliffs presenting innumerable grotesque forms that change with the point of view.

Originally the entire region of the present Big Bad Lands was a relatively smooth plain built of thick sheets of sand and sandy clay deposited by ancient rivers of Tertiary times flowing from the west. The bedding of the soft fine-grained sandstone usually is plainly visible in horizontal banding of many delicate shades. Occasional beds of coarse materials mark the course of a strong current of some old river. In recent geologic time, as the geologist views chronology, this region was uplifted as a high plateau, and White River and the south fork of Cheyenne River and their branches began cutting deeply into the surface of the plains. Although the streams appear to be insufficient to erode extensively, the rain which falls in spring and early summer comes not in gentle showers but as a typical western cloudburst, and the torrents that then flood the gullies and the valleys continue the erosion that developed this great area of bad lands. The steep declivity and the softness of the massive sandstone are exceedingly favorable conditions for rapid erosion.