Definition of "badlands"

Not only do the Bad Lands present a most attractive field to the student of erosion and of the origin of earth forms, but their deathlike solitudes have been made to yield the most wonderful procession of strange extinct animals yet unearthed by geologists.

1904, Israel C. Russell, North America, New York: D. Appleton and Company, page 111

No one has ever described better the shaggy badlands and cabbage-patches round the edges of a city, where the debris of civilization piles up ramshackle suburbs in which starve and scheme all manner of human detritus.

1922, John Dos Passos, “A Novelist of Revolution”, in Rosinante to the Road Again, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, page 85