badlands

The Lakota Sioux called the deeply eroded terrain of what is now southwestern South Dakota mako sica—"bad land" or "land that is bad." The badlands were not evil but impractical: impossible to farm, difficult to cross on foot or horseback, and short on water. The terrain was beautiful but useless for human purposes. French-Canadian fur trappers translated the Lakota phrase as les mauvaises terres à traverser—"bad lands to travel across."

English settlers shortened it to badlands. The Badlands of South Dakota became a proper noun, but the word also became a geological term for any terrain heavily eroded into ravines, gullies, and sharp ridges by wind and water acting on soft sedimentary rock. Badlands form where rainfall is sparse but intense—occasional downpours cut deep channels in clay and siltstone that have no vegetation to hold them together.

The South Dakota Badlands preserve one of the richest fossil beds in North America. The White River Badlands contain fossils from the Eocene and Oligocene epochs, 23-37 million years old: three-toed horses, saber-toothed cats, giant pigs, and early camels. The erosion that created the badlands also exposed the fossils. What was bad for farming was good for paleontology.

Badlands National Park was established in 1978, though it had been a national monument since 1939. Badlands terrain exists on every continent: the Bardenas Reales in Spain, the Cheltenham Badlands in Ontario, the Zabriskie Point formations in Death Valley. The Lakota word, translated through French and English, now names a global geological category. The land the Lakota could not use became the landscape tourists travel thousands of miles to photograph.