A beautiful rural area; also, the back country or provinces, the sticks. This expression, alluding at first to an area considered especially favored by God, originated in the United States during the Civil War. A Union soldier who was imprisoned in the South so referred to the North: “If I could only get out of that horrible den, into God’s country once more” (R. H. Kellogg, Rebel Prisons, 1865).