Dan Flores

For travelers moving across North America from east to west, as was the case for Americans in the 1800s, Badlands first cropped up in places like West Texas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, then emerged in scattered locations from New Mexico to California.

They draped the whole bottom half of Utah and appear as far north on the plains as Montana and Alberta.

In the 19th century, almost everywhere the edges of mountain ranges, canyon defiles, or sweeping plains erupted into exposed badlands, paleontologists found them to be crucial for the fossil discoveries that took Darwinian evolution from theory to fact, which made them a peculiar scientific destination.

In the United States, the work that turned Western Badlands into a mecca for paleontology began in 1849, when Dr. John Evans explored the Dakota Badlands and published a scientific article on their possibilities.

From that point, a wide range of luminaries, like Yellowstone Park advocate Ferdinand Vandiver Hayden, intensively sought out the West's Badlands to dig fossils.

In the post-Darwin era, Yale paleontologist Othniel Marsh was stimulated by a stirring Thomas Huxley lecture in New York in 1876 to assemble a chronology of horse evolution that became the principal evidence to support Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

These days, Jack Horner and other modern dinosaur scholars still ply the Badlands for major discoveries from the continent's remote past.

We've gotten a version of this in the opening scenes of at least half the Jurassic Park movies.

Badlands are still the primary target of the modern dinosaur hunt in the United States, Canada, and China today.

Post-Civil War American explorer John Wesley Powell, who saw and wrote more about the West than anyone else of his time, said prophetically of the Badlands he'd explored that they were, as he put it, a desert to the agriculturalist, a mine to the paleontologist, and a paradise to the artist.

As usual, Powell got it exactly right.

While scientific investigation came first and is still underway, for the past hundred years it's been artists, photographers, hikers, and simple lovers of landscape who have turned these once maligned landforms into scenery appreciated for its sensuousness and aesthetics.

Badlands are like the western deserts in that respect, but you have to admit it took someone like a Georgia O'Keeffe or an Edward Abbey to make the rest of us begin to pay attention.

Badlands' reputations may have begun to change for some Americans even before O'Keeffe began to paint, though.

About a century before our time, with homesteading of much of the West almost over and the automobiles starting to make formerly dreaded and even dangerous places suddenly less formidable, Badlands began a slow process of shedding their former treatment as worthless waste.

In 1899, explorer Robert Hill descended the Rio Grande River in West Texas through future Big Bend National Park, the story of which he published in Century Magazine in 1901.

It took Hill nearly a month of constant familiarity with sights like vermilion foothills of red clay, as he wrote, before the adjectives weird, repulsive, spiteful, bizarre, and sterile finally dropped from his verbal palate, replaced with some grudging admiration of form and color.

But eventually, with a lot of practice, Hill did begin to appreciate this new western landform as a visual feature he could admire.

Robert Hill's journey and article were a kind of watershed take on Badlands, an early break from the dismissive place they had occupied in landscape aesthetics in the 19th century and earlier.

It's interesting and worth some reflection, I think, that with a landform that offered no economic possibilities, whose lure for some was scientific but for most aesthetic, a disproportionately high number of women emerged as admirers of Badlands scenery.