Bad Lands

(1852) Calque du français Mauvaises Terres (également attesté en anglais), composé de bad (« mauvais ») et lands (« terres »).

Bad Lands \ˌbæd ˈlændz\

1. Mauvaises Terres, région ravinée et difficilement franchissable du Dakota du Nord.
   • The Mauvaises Terres, or Bad Lands, as they are named, constitute a district of country extending along the foot of the Black Hills, a spur of the Rocky Mountains, situated between the Platte, or Nebraska, and the Missouri Rivers, at the head of certain branches of the latter called the L’eau-qui-court, White, Cheyenne, and Moreau rivers. — (Joseph Leidy, The ancient fauna of Nebraska, Smithsonian Institution, 1852, page 10)
   • Theodore [Roosevelt] saw grandeur and mystery. The Bad Lands were “dreary and forbidding,” they were “as grim and desolate and forbidding as any spot on earth could be,” and he felt he belonged. “The country is growing on me, more and more,” he had written Bamie in June, “it has a curious, fantastic beauty of its own...” The Bad Lands looked, he decided, the way Poe sounds. — (David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, Simon & Schuster, 1982, chapitre 15)
2. (Par analogie) Nom donné à différents badlands des États-Unis, notamment dans le Dakota du Sud, mais aussi au Montana, Kansas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, etc.

• Badlands

• Bad Lands sur l’encyclopédie Wikipédia (en anglais)