![]() ![]() Kipling concluded with, “What then should a city be rechristened that has sold its name? Judasville.” Her success is his success her shame is his shame’ her honour is his honour and her good name is his good name.” … (A man’s city) is the living background of his life and love and toil and hope and sorrow and joy. It has no duplicate in the world it makes men ask questions, and as I knew, more than twenty years ago, draws the feet of the young men towards it it has the qualities of uniqueness, individuality, assertion and power.Ībove all, it is the lawful, original, sweat-and-dust-won name of the city and to change it would be to risk the luck of the city to disgust and dishearten old-timers, not in the city alone, but the world over… It echoes as you so justly put it the old Cree and Blackfoot tradition of red mystery and romance that once filled the prairie… Believe me, the very name is an asset, and as years go on will become more and more of an asset. “…To my mind, the name of Medicine Hat has an advantage over (other cities with similarly unique names). Fatt, the editor of the Medicine Hat News. Kipling responded by advocating the old name in a letter written to Francis F. A number of old-school Hatters, however, strongly opposed this proposal and entreated the support of Rudyard Kipling, the famous English writer who had a special place in his heart for Medicine Hat. These disgruntled citizens believed that industries might be attracted to a city with a more conventional name like Gasburg (which would reflect the city’s newfound natural gas) or Smithville (in honour of the C.P.R. In fact, some early Hatters- as Medicine Hat residents are sometimes called – considered the name to be so bizarre that in 1910, when natural gas was discovered in the area, they petitioned to change it. As is the case with most things that deviate from the norm, Medicine Hat’s name wasn’t always unanimously accepted. Either way, the Badlands Guardian is a remarkable feature.Although Medicine Hat has spent time in the Canadian spotlight for a number of different reasons, perhaps its true and most timeless claim to fame is its strange name. The Badlands Guardian is an example of the hollow face illusion. Like numerous geoglyphs across the world the Badlands Guardian can only be seen from above (Figure 3).Īlthough it is likely that nature conspired to produce this phenomenon by the interplay of countless random events, it is not impossible that a pre-existing landform could have been modified in specific ways to produce this face. Figure 3 The Badlands Guardian is not visible at ground level. This would not be the case if it were oriented in another direction. ![]() Figure 2 Appearance at noon on the summer solstice (left), Equinox (middle), and winter solstice (right).Įven more remarkable, the alignment of the feature to north and to the path of the sun is such that the feature maintains a consistent appearance at noon over the course of the year (Figure 2). That it is aligned to north and depicts the indigenous people would seem to be an unlikely coincidence. That one of these formations is oriented to north is not unusual in itself. There are perhaps hundreds or even thousands of similar badlands formations in North America. ![]() Second, the formation is aligned to north. That it appears to represent the people native to the area is an interesting coincidence. Although the feature is thought to be the result of erosional processes there is much about it that is unusual.įirst is the visual form itself – that of a human figure, similar in appearance to the indigenous people from this part of Canada, wearing a headdress. This feature known as the Badlands Guardian was first discovered in Google Earth imagery in 2005. ![]() Twenty-five miles east of the town of Medicine Hat in Alberta Canada is a landform that resembles a face looking due west. Figure 1 The Badlands Guardian is barely evident in Alberta’s earliest air photos taken in 1949-1951. This series of articles discusses three surface features that resemble faces: a strange landform in Alberta Canada known as the Badlands Guardian that was discovered in 2005, a carved stone formation found by Daniel Ruzo on the Marcahuasi Plateau in Peru in the 1950s, and the Face on Mars, a mile-long structure on the surface of Mars first imaged by a Viking orbiter spacecraft in 1976. ![]()
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