Bill Lowman

Bill Lowman was raised on his folks' cow-calf outfit in the rugged western North Dakota Badlands, some twenty miles northeast of Sentinel Butte, where he and his wife, JoAnn, ranch today. The youngest of four siblings, and with forty head of horses around, Bill quickly became an honor student of the "School of Hard Knocks," with broken bones in a two digit figure. A product of the one-room school country school, he graduated from Sentinel Butte High in 1965, an all-conference standout in basketball and softball. Bill then studied art at the Art Institute of Miami, Florida.

He worked on ranches in Wyoming and North Dakota and drove sled dogs above Aspen, Colorado. Bill and his brothers worked amateur weekend rodeos in a three-state area, riding bulls. He is an accomplished heavy equipment operator, working with any contractor that was close to home" for twenty years before he and JoAnn started "Lowman's Construction," which they have owned and operated for more than twenty years. They have built numerous roads, hundreds of stock dams and have installed over 3/4 million feet of fresh water pipeline in a 100 mile radius of the ranch. The Lowmans also constructed and operate "Lowman's Lodge," a guest house and hunting lodge on the ranch.

The multi-talented Lowman is an accomplished visual artist, performing artist and literary artist. Over 300 of his originals hang in private collections from Hong Kong to Sweden. Lowman has written and illustrated three books of cowboy humor and poetry and a forth of cowboy cartoons. A fifth book of cowboy humor, plus a western novel, are near publications. He is a guest author in "Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry" edited by David Stanley and Elaine Thatcher, and printed by the University of Illinois Press. Bill and JoAnn are featured in "Unwanted Bread," a book on the plight of agricultural people in the upper Midwest, written by University of Moorhead Senior Staff Writer, Sheldon Green and James Coomber.

Bills poem, "The Great Wannagan Creek Flood" is Gibbs Smith's publication, "Cowboy Poetry, A Gathering." Lowman has graced the cover of "Midwest Living Magazine," and has modeled for "L.L. Bean."

This sought-after entertainer averages over a performance per week across the nation. His "down home" cowboy humor has spread out of the cowboy world to conventions of Optometrists, Surgeons, Aviators, Paving Contractors and Librarians, to name a few, along with a steady diet of ag-related banquets, rodeos and fairs. Lowman has performed the "Main Act" at the famous Medora Musical many, many times. He is the driving force behind cowboy poetry in the Dakotas, as the founder and director the Dakota Cowboy Poetry Gather, held each Memorial Day weekend in Medora, North Dakota. It is the oldest ongoing regional gathering in the nation. A charter member of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, Lowman has been on their night show, handled emcee chores, had his artwork featured and sat on the very first national selection board.

Lowman has toured for years with the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame, North Dakota Humanities and North Dakota Council on the Arts. He has received the Greater North Dakota Award for Tourism Development and is the only individual in North Dakota to go on record in Washington, D.C.'s Library of Congress as a "Local Legacy" for preserving the Cowboy Tradttion. Bill works several schools each winter, teaching writing and visual art. He is a premier poet and story teller.