THE BAD LANDS 



GREEN RIVER BUTTE, WYOMING. 



ground of creation, where all the refuse has been gathered. 

 What one sees at home in a clay bank by the roadside on 

 a scale of a few feet, he sees here on a scale of hundreds 

 and thousands of feet — the erosions and the sculpturing of 

 a continent, vast, titanic ; mountain ranges, like newly piled 

 earth from some globe-piercing mine shaft, all furrowed 

 and carved by the elements, as if in yesterday's rainfall. 

 It all has a new, tran- 

 sitory look. Buttes or 

 table mountains stand 

 up here and there like 

 huge earth stumps. 



Along Green River 

 we see where nature 

 begins to dream of the 

 great canyon of the 

 Colorado. Throughout a vast stretch of country here 

 her one thought seems to be of canyons. You see them 

 on every hand, little and big— deep, rectangular grooves 

 sunk in the plain, sides perpendicular, bottom level, all 

 the lines sharp and abrupt. All the little dry water 

 courses are canyons, the depth and breadth being about 

 equal; the streams have no banks, only perpendicular walls. 



As you go south these features become more and more 

 pronounced till you reach the stupendous canyon of the 

 Colorado in Arizona. On our return in August we struck 

 this formation in the Bad Lands of Utah, where our train 

 was stalled a day and a half by a washout. The earth 

 seems to have been flayed alive in the Bad Lands, no 

 skin or turf of verdure or vegetable mould anywhere, 

 all raw and quivering. The country looks as if it might 

 have been the site of enormous brickyards; over hun- 

 dreds of square miles the clay seems to have been used up 

 to the depth of fifty or a hundred feet, leaving a clay floor 

 much worn and grooved by the elements. The mountains 



