Saturday, April 19, 2008
Badlands
Donald Culross Peattie, The Road of a Naturalist, chapter 5:
Thomas Moran, Badlands of the Dakotas
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Badlands are bad enough for the farmer or cattleman who so names them. Intractable to the plow, inhospitable to cattle, they offer nothing practical to be done with them. But the naturalist calls them not bad at all; like bogs, everglades, or bleak alpine passes, they are good going precisely because they are hard going. What you bring out of them will be nothing you could have found near home; I got what I count riches in the desert. In Nature the only barrens are the cities; these are all a howling wilderness where neither lion nor jackal dare set foot.
