Michigan Badlands?

In the first year of the war with England in 1812, an act was passed by congress requiring that two million acres of land in each of the territories of Michigan, Illinois, and Louisiana, in all six million acres, should be surveyed and set apart as a military tract, and of which each soldier serving in the armies of the United States in the war with England should be entitled to receive one hundred and sixty acres of land fit for cultivation.

The surveyor general in his report dated November 13, 1815, gave such discouraging and dismal accounts of the country that congress, on April 29, 1816, repealed so much of the act of 1812 authorizing the soldier's land in Michigan and providing in lieu thereof a survey and location of land in Missouri. [Source]