Bill Lowman

Badlands Rancher and Cowboy Poet

Prairie Public
Well this is very slick this whole feeding business today.

Bill Lowman
This is state of the art. This is brand new for me. We’ve done it the hard way for…I’m 56 years old just about, and this is the first day for this feeder so we’ve done it the hard way—pushed bales on by hand and rolled off by hand down a hill and sacked cake and fed corn cobs with a scoop shovel.

Prairie Public
So you could keep ranchin?

Bill Lowman
I think I’ll make till like George Burns says I wish I was 80 again. I think I can make it till I’m 90 now.

Prairie Public
Ranching has been a little hard on you. It probably is on lots of people. It’s just hard on the old body isn’t it?

Bill Lowman
It really is. I’m the youngest of four and who grew up with 40 head of horses and always had a devil may care attitude. And I was the recipient of a lot of broken bones in my younger years, and they’re starting to catch up with me now. I am full of arthritis, and then I’ve had a lot of wrecks lately. I think what happened was I went through the younger years after I got over the early wrecks and done real good, and we rodeo’d and different stuff and then didn’t have many broken bones, and now I think my reflexes slowed down and my mind isn’t ready to admit it, and I’m breakin’ a lot of bones again now.

But we’re survivors out here ranching in the Badlands. We’re survivors. We’ll find a way to do it. Life’s an adjustment anyway, and no matter how crippled up you are or how broke down your outfits are, you learn to do it. One way or another you learn to survive…might not finish first, but we’ll be standing when the fight’s over or when the race is over, we’ll be there. That’s basically what ranching’s about. You learn to improvise and use old equipment and scrounge here and there as long as you don’t cheat on your cows. You don’t cheat on feeding your cows because that’s what you’re doing out here so you have to keep those in top health. But otherwise you learn to skimp and save and do without and work alone. We work alone a lot. That’s why I got into writing stories and doing poetry 'cause we have a lot of free mental time on our physical load.

Prairie Public
What do you think about out here?

Bill Lowman
There’s always funny happenings, and I make the mistake of writin’ em’ down. I carry a notebook and keep notes all the time and write ‘em down. Some of the poems will write themselves so fast you gotta shut down and write ‘em down. They write themselves so fast you can barely get ‘em wrote down. And those are usually the good ones 'cause they’re spontaneous, and one that you labor on it for two weeks or something, they usually don’t obey or something. They don’t turn out as good.

Prairie Public
Have you had the poems that got away, the ones that you didn’t write down?

Bill Lowman
Oh yeah, oh yeah. I’ve learned to coach myself, and I wake up at two in the morning and write things down now or stop whatever I’m doing. I’m writing ‘em off the saddlehorn or stop and write it down so I’ve coached myself to write down those thoughts. I have what I call a cull pile. I probably have 40 or 50 partly written poems that wrote themselves halfway. The idea was good, and I’ve never forced ‘em, and one day the thought’ll come back and maybe it won’t but maybe it will. Some of those will write themselves later on, but I’ve got a cull pile.

Prairie Public
So, what happens here on the ranch is kinda one big analogy for all other things in life? Do you see something and you think boy that’s just like people?

Bill Lowman
I think you hit that. Yeah it’s a good way no matter what walk of life you’re in if you get too sophisticated and too mighty and stuff, this is a good way to come back and get your head on straight. Everything goes back to nature and goes back to the soil, and it’s a good way to get your head on straight or to keep your head on straight if you’re out here.

Prairie Public
So nature will tell you how to solve your problems if you just watch?

Bill Lowman
I think so. I think every dollar comes originally from the soil. The rest of the dollars no matter how educated or sophisticated we get, we’re just passing one dollar from one person to the other. Every dollar originally has to come from the soil in ag or mining or natural resource of some kind.

Prairie Public
You got a short poem that you can think of that you say off the top of your head, maybe say to school kids a hundred times?

Bill Lowman
You know, our stuff is a little raw, but it’s very basic, very earthly, and very functional. All we’re doing with these poems or stories, we’re recording day to day history that otherwise would get lost, and anything is fair game short of a death or an accident as long as it doesn’t happen to you. Anything’s fair game so it’s a good way to tattle on your neighbors. I hate gossips. Gossips are my pet peeve, but yet I can go into the little town coffee shop and sit in on their gossip stations, come home, write a poem about it, give it back to them, and then they look up to me because it’s an art form then. It’s not gossip. It’s a piece of art. I have a good friend in the sand hills in Nebraska, and this is pretty basic, but it happened to him. It’s worth telling, and he won’t tell it so I have to. And I wrote a poem, I call it "Gold Rush." It’s one of my earlier poems.

At Sunday dinner he bowed his head.
In a short while the prayers were said.
Pass the steak, potatoes too,
Roastin’ ears from the garden brand new.
With a swaller he knew something went bad.
It was the only gold filling that he ever had.
Well, now a secret worth keeping has got to be told.
Every morning in there he’s panning for gold.
Keepin’ a check, hopin’ it’ll pass.
Every time he tries it’s mostly gas.
He turned 49 when he hit the sack.
About a gold rush there’s lots of flack.
But from the bathroom he came looking forlorn.
He thought he’s struck gold.
It was only corn.

Real basic stuff, but that would have got lost if you wouldn’t have put it in a poem form or a song or a story. And that way it’s recorded. It’s an art form. It gets in a book, and it’s preserved.

Prairie Public
So that was a true story?

Bill Lowman
Yeah, yeah, and all of these are—that was very true. All of these are true, only as you get into it more, if you’re a writer or an artist, you have a license to expand the truth. so basically all your stories are true, and then you add to ‘em.

Prairie Public
Tell me about yourself.

Bill Lowman
I was born and raised here. I’m on the home ranch, and then we’ve added to it since then.

Prairie Public
Did you think about it being pretty when you were a kid?

Bill Lowman
Not in a way that you stop and say oh, isn’t this gorgeous. It was just a part of our life and rough and reckless childhood, but yeah we always enjoyed the beauty. I mean it was just an accepted thing, but it wasn’t appreciated like somebody would drive out from an office job and just ooo and ahh over it because we lived it every day. And then we had our work to do in it. And that’s yet today. It’s hard to slow down. As I get older, I can slow down and stand here on a beautiful day like today and watch the cows eat. They’re all healthy and eatin’ good and really enjoy it. But when I was younger, why I got them fed, I gotta go do this and that. I’m managing time. I’ve got four businesses. I’ve got the ranch. I’ve got a dirt construction business. I’ve got a hunting lodge, and I’ve got an entertainment business. So basically as laid back as our lifestyle should be out here, it isn’t normal for me because I’ve got three other occupations besides the ranching. So basically I’m just like you are, I’m managing time. Time is important to me so I can’t let up and enjoy it as much as I should. I know it’s there to enjoy and have to tell myself to, but a lot of days are wham bang, and if something breaks down, then you’re really behind schedule.

Prairie Public
So despite the modern conveniences, your life is different from what your father’s was and his father before him.

Bill Lowman
Yeah, exactly. My dad put this ranch together, bought most of it from the county piece by piece but it went back to the county on homestead heartbreaks. He done everything by hand with a shovel, with an ax, with a pick, with a bar as long as settin’ postholes by hand. I done that all my life till three years ago, I got a posthole digger. But as long as his cows were healthy and the hay was put up, time wasn’t a big deal. They would set back and relax in the evening, quit at 6:00. We turn the lights on and keep going. Yeah, our lifestyles are very different, but they had as hard of times but in a different way. My hard times are financial pressures, making payments to the bank where their financial pressures was to make it through the day, have enough food to eat, and they were more self-sufficient, but time wasn’t a big thing.

Prairie Public
It appears that everybody really likes what you have here, and there’s a lot of interest in this land, and it’s far beyond its ability to raise cattle.

Bill Lowman
You hit that right on the nose. It’s turning as a resort and vacationing area. I always grew up, I love the mountains, and when I grew up enough to get away from home and go out to the mountains and that, boy I wanna retire out here in the mountains. Now I don’t. That’s too full of people. Everybody else has found it first, and like you say they’re actually overflowing and coming in here now. So yeah, I guess this is where everybody else wants to be. This is where I should want to be.

Prairie Public
What kind of pressure does that put on ranchers though when this land maybe has competition for it?

Bill Lowman
If you want to expand or what not, for young couples starting, it’s just prohibitive anymore because of the outside interests. There’s no way that you can buy this land for what outside interests will give for it and make a living on it. So if you’re not already set up or handed down, it’s prohibitive. The only way young couples can be on a ranch is work for some big corporation that bought a place now, and it’s kinda sad to see that. But times change. Times are never the same, and you have to adjust as they go so.

Prairie Public
So it’s a big adjustment with land ownership, maybe people are still running cattle on that land, but somebody else owns it.

Bill Lowman
Right. The land will always be used. It’ll be used for cattle the farmland. When one person goes broke, somebody else will farm it. Somebody will get bigger and farm it. It’ll always be used, but it isn’t good for the country at all.

Prairie Public
You don’t think so?

Bill Lowman
I don’t think so. We need young people in the country that work the soil, and rural America is our—America was built on common sense, and we’re losing that. Rural America is the foundation of common sense. And the higher you go, the more sophisticated we get, why the more we specialize, and the more we specialize the more we lose our common sense I think. We have to come back again to our basics.

Prairie Public
Do you think that’s what being a rancher is is using more common sense than anything else?

Bill Lowman
I think so because we have to be. We’re not specialists in any one thing. We’re a jack of all trades. We have to know the cattle market. We have to know the breed of our bulls-the bloodlines. We have to know the grain market. We have to know what fenceposts costs. We have to know a whole sphere of things enough. We have to be aware of it enough. We know what is good and what is bad as far as businesswise, but we don’t have to be an expert on any of it so we get a broad range of everything, and common sense has to rule.

Prairie Public
You run a traditional operation don’t you? Cow and calf. You haven’t retained ownership or anything. Have you been tempted that you should be doing this thing or that thing that other people are involved in?

Bill Lowman
I don’t get drew in by that. You do what works for you. Every operation’s different, but I kinda basically try to run on a 10-year average. My dad told me when I was five years old that a cow market will make a full cycle in a cow’s life. From eight to 12 years out here is about all you can get out of a cow, and the market will go in a full cycle from top to bottom and back again. And I’ve been to college courses where the professors tell me that. Well I tell ‘em well I’m sorry my dad taught me that when I was five years old. So the retained ownership thing, yeah you don’t…my theory is to stay steady if it’s working and don’t try to get fancy or you’re gonna get caught. When we went through that personally here 15 or 20 years ago where feed lots out of Kansas and Nebraska were flying up here three in a plane and put on steak feeds for ranchers at nightclubs and show films and talk ‘em into sending their calves down with retained ownership and they would feed ‘em. Basic again, common sense. Why are they doing that? If it’s such a good deal, why are they flying up here and buying us steak if it’s working? They’re in trouble. They’re going broke. Yeah, a red flag comes up, but some people went for it and it didn’t work. I mean so yeah that’s basically common sense again. I mean you gotta analyze why this works and why it doesn’t.

Prairie Public
What do you love about this life?

Bill Lowman
I don’t know anything different. Ah it’s good. It’s fresh air, healthy. I got into moving dirt, and I’ve been on scrapers for 40 years now and had my own equipment 20 years. And I got on scrapers to supplement the ranch income until the ranch would support itself. Here it’s 40 years later, I’m still doing it, but if I was a natural rancher, a normal rancher, why then I could kick back in the evenings and enjoy life better. But yeah, it’s a good way of life. It really is. You get to thinking there’s better ways, and you take a trip, and home looks pretty good when you come back. I’m very blessed to be in the entertainment business where I get out and do 50 or 60 banquets a year, and I see the other side constantly. I get this constant reminder, and it’s always good to come home. If I was home here and not going that much, then I might feel I should be doing something else. I’ve got a nice balance here.

Prairie Public
And the toughest thing is?

Bill Lowman
The toughest thing would be financial pressures on bad years, dry years, big payments, payments have to be made whether you’re dried out or not or equipment breaks down, financial pressures constantly. You have to learn to put ‘em in the back of your mind and do the best you can. Otherwise you’ll get ulcers; they’ll get you down. And we’re not alone. Everybody’s in that boat. Yeah, I would say financial pressures by far.

Prairie Public
What type of operation do you have here? Tell me what you like.

Bill Lowman
Okay, we’re basically a cow/calf operation which means we have a mother cow herd, and we calf our cows out in the spring of the year, naturally out in the hills. We don’t barn calf, don’t have that many barns, and we contract or sell our calves through a live auction before winter, usually the end of October, first of November, get ‘em across the scale. That’s our payday for the year. That’s our check. And then what feed we do raise and buy we maintain our cow herd through the winter for the next calf crop as we call it.

Prairie Public
You don’t do any farming?

Bill Lowman
What we farm is all either hay or feed grain to put into our cattle. We do not sell a cash crop on our farm.

Prairie Public
How does what you do today compare to how your dad used to ranch?

Bill Lowman
Oh, you have to keep getting bigger to stay the same size. We have more pressures on finances because we have better, newer equipment or bigger equipment, more breakdowns, more financial pressures, time is more valuable to us because of that. They done things by hand more.

Prairie Public
You’re bigger than what your dad was?

Bill Lowman
Yeah, 100 cows used to be a nice average ranch out here to earn a living. Now 300 is a nice average ranch, and you can go broke just as fast with 300 as you can with 100.

Prairie Public
A lot of people when I tell them what I’m doing, they say well you know how is ranching today? Is it good? Is it bad? And I say well you know I don’t know. Depends upon who I’m talking to, what day it is, what year you know they’re talking about. How would you describe how is ranching today?

Bill Lowman
The cattle market has been extremely steady the last 10 or 12 years which is unusual. Usually it goes on a roller coaster. In the life span of a cow from eight to 12 years, it’ll go in a full cycle from top to bottom and back again. And we’ve been riding a pretty good high. World events have an effect on things, but usually it’s controlled by a natural disaster more than anything—tough winters or drouth or drought as they call it now has basically more effect in a big area on the market than any human being can ever, ever do although they do effect it.

Prairie Public
Has that affected you this year? It’s been pretty dry around here.

Bill Lowman
We’ve really been fortunate here north of Sentinel Butte. We’ve been off the edge of the big Montana droughts for the last three years, and then we were off the north side of the South Dakota one this year so we’ve really…we haven’t had big years but we’ve had good grass years, and we’ve had to buy our hay and stuff, some of it, but some we make, and we’ve been much more fortunate than most people. But we’re just a day away from a drouth usually, but that’s a way of life. Agriculture: my way of thinking is it’s never easy. It’s always tough, whether you’re farming or ranching, it’s always tough. If you’re starting out, there’s never a perfect time to get in. You get in when the opportunity is there. You don’t get in when there’s a perfect time or you never will start. There’s never a perfect time. If land’s cheap or your product’s cheap. If land’s high, cattle high. You get a good return, but it’s never a good time. Ag’s always a fight. You gotta like it and like that way of life or you won’t stay in it 'cause it’s a lifelong commitment, and it’s a good way of life, but it’s tough. It’s a survival of wills.

Prairie Public
Has it always been in your family like a sacred trust that you have to keep this land together?

Bill Lowman
It’s never mentioned, but I think it’s a built-in thing that yeah you hit that pretty close. It’s a built-in thing that just always there, and it’s never talked about.

I travel a lot and do a lot of banquets and entertaining so I have kind of an unusual lifestyle compared to most people, but I ran into a gal, a saddlemaker up in the Devil’s Lake country, and her and her husband had two girls. And he thanked her for having two girls. He said now we won’t have to hang onto this thing and make sure it’s passed down to the family. When we get ready to retire, we can go an enjoy ourselves. And I’d never heard that before. That was an interesting twist.

Prairie Public
Now you have an interesting thing happening around here, the transition in land values, in land uses that it’s turning from agricultural to being more valuable as a recreational source.

Bill Lowman
We’re seeing that. We knew it was coming. We watched it come originally 10, 12, 15, 20 years ago. Basically the Californians get all the blame, just or not. They were buying small ranches in western Montana in the beautiful mountains, and those people were displaced, and they’d come down here and buy ranches beside me. So we got an indirect effect of that first one, and now we’re seeing a direct effect where our ranches are going to outside interests for recreation and other things, and there’s no young people can afford to buy a ranch and make it pay. They have to work for a corporation or some outside interest. If they want a ranch, they had to just be day workhands anymore. It’s hard to see 'cause the country needs young families and business people on it, and we’re going away from that.

Prairie Public
What are those people doing with these ranches?

Bill Lowman
We get a lot of people that love the Badlands and done well somewhere else. They’ve either vacationed out here or hunted out here, and it’s their lifelong dream to own a piece of it, whether for hunting or recreation. Some of the bigger more well to do ones are buying it up for whatever reason. They spend a couple weeks out here in the summer and enjoy it and go and basically run it like a ranch, but it doesn’t have to make money. The money’s made somewhere else. So that’s a whole different ballgame.

Prairie Public
What’s the problem with that?

Bill Lowman
That’s a foul. The backbone of this nation is rural as far as I’m concerned. That’s where the common sense is and everything, and family life is gone. There’s no rural family life. Our nearest neighbor is seven miles away. That’s our nearest neighbor. That’s in one direction. There’s federal land on three sides of us. We neighbor with working neighbors, ride and do our ranch work, trade work 30, 40, 50 miles away, and they’re next door neighbors to us, and there used to be 60 mailboxes at our western end community mailbox end of route three miles from the ranch here back in the homestead days. Now there’s one mailbox that my wife and I and my mother get our mail at.

Prairie Public
Where do the kids go to school?

Bill Lowman
When our children grew up, they ended up going into Beach, North Dakota, which is right on the Montana line. That’s a 30-mile, one-way trip, and that was their closest school. I went to a grade school three miles from home here, but that’s long gone.

Prairie Public
If you were to look at this land in maybe 10 years, 20 years, what do you think this will look like, this part of the country?

Bill Lowman
Boy that’s hard to say. I’m a firm believer that history repeats itself. I think the country will probably fill up with people again, but I don’t know when or why, what type of people they’ll be. Right now we’re in a trend where we’re losing our people, and we’re repeating a history of 100 to 120 years ago when the big cattle drives come out of Texas up here for free grass and good grass, and the cattle were owned by big corporations, and the only cowboys were day work cowboys and were banned to even own a cow or have a brand of their own. It was against the law for ‘em. That’s what started the Johnson County Wars in Wyoming was the upheaval of people wanting to go on their own and fighting the big system. But right now we’re repeating that history of 100 years ago where our country’s in that trend. But yeah, I think it’ll…I’m a firm believer it’ll come around again, but that’s down the road quite a ways.

Prairie Public
Does the consolidation in the meat markets and how that affects your prices concern you?

Bill Lowman
It does, but I don’t let it bother me. I guess I should get more involved in it, but Joanne and I we have a unique business here to make the ranch go. We have three outsides businesses. We have a dirt construction business. We have a lodge business. We have a speaking business plus the ranching which is a full-time job in itself so I’ve coached myself not to get involved in boards and things like that 'cause I simply physically do not have time to get involved in it. I need to, but I have to leave that for somebody else to do because I would have an ulcer. It would drive me nuts.

I’ve got three times more than a young person should be doing now that I’m trying to do just to survive. And that’s the bottom line. Out here we’re survivors. We’re basically survivors. We’ll do what we have to do to stay on the land. We’ve been, Joanne and I, kind of a pioneer. We got married in 1970 which is awhile back already, and FHA loans were easy to get for young couples. They pushed money at you, and if you bought a place they wanted a new house on it. And I bowed my head and said a new house is nice, but a new barn would make more sense until we get some bills paid, but that was government policy from upstairs down so you don’t buck that.

I’ve watched a lot of people in the area go broke because of a new house. It’s dead weight. It doesn’t pay bills. We bucked it. We side-stepped it and bought a little place and then got a trailer house and set on my folks’ place and operated it with an operational loan so we got past having to build a new house to kill us. The ones that had to build new houses are basically all gone.

So then the trouble with government agencies which are a good deal that they learn by their past mistakes so they’re always a generation behind on getting anything that works right, and that they found out a generation later that those are all going broke so they abandoned that policy. Well were pioneering and bucked it ahead of time basically.

In that same parallel another thing was if we had an FHA loan and they didn’t want us working out. They wanted us staying home taking care of their investment, of their cattle and their ranch, and one of us had to work out to let the cows pay the ranch and make our living. Joanne driving 30 miles to work as a waitress would hardly pay the gas. I was a heavy equipment operator so I could work out and get a better dollar, and she could stay home and do the lighter work and the maintenance work, run a tractor, haying, check pipelines, put salt mineral out, and I could do the setting ties and stuff during the weekends and nights. So twice we’ve bucked the system. Then 10 years later they realized "hey people have to work out to do this" so they called it diversification, and then that was the thing. So we bucked that thing twice over 20 years as a pioneer you might say, but we’re survivors so that’s why we done it. We will find a way to survive.

Prairie Public
How did you start doing the poetry?

Bill Lowman
For self-amusement. In the wintertime feeding cows, that’s our vacation time in the wintertime. We’ll feed cows for three hours or half a day, and then we’ve got the rest of the days to ourselves, and time isn’t such a push. The wintertime, time isn’t such a push. I’ve always been a big fan of the hardcore country music George Jones stuff. That’s telling a story in rhyme. I’d be with negative people quite a bit when I started writing poetry, and I would have coffee with those type people, and they didn’t know they were doing it, but their way of building themselves up was by condemning other people. Then I would go out and work with animals and livestock and didn’t see that happening.

And I got to thinking there’s got to be something constructive to do with your mind. Instead of running other people down so I started listening to these country music songs. I started writing songs. And then, well, I can’t sing or write music, so they’re poems and quite traditional. I was a closet poet. I didn’t think it was good enough, and I didn’t want anybody to see it.

I wrote a Christmas poem one time about getting a Christmas tree. That’s a big Christmas tradition for us to go and stomp the hills half a day after feeding and get a tree. That year the kids were little. Out two boys were little, and it was a miserable winter, and I took a horse out to get one in the crusted snow, and I didn’t want to ride a good old broke horse 'cause I felt sorry for him, and so I took a bronc. Coming back home the rope got under his tail and it blew up, and it knocked all the needles off the tree so it was a funny thing but yet serious, but it needed recording. We’re recording things that happen is what we’re doing. And I wrote that poem, and it turned out pretty good. Joanne was proud of it, and I didn’t want anybody to see it. She sent it in to REC’s magazine, and they printed it, and that was what started it all.

And then the national cowboy poetry gathering at that time was gaining steam through the Western Folk Life Center and the humanities and arts councils around the Midwest and western states, and our folklorist who was Gretta Swanson at the time through word of mouth found out about that poem and that I was doing that kind of thing, and she found me. I didn’t find her. And that’s what makes it work. It wasn’t the people writing the poetry throughout the West that were looking for notoriety or anything. They were just recording things and amusing themselves, and that’s how poetry was done 120 years ago was for self-amusement on the trails and stuff. That’s why it works so well, and that’s how I got started.

Prairie Public
Do you have another favorite poem?

Bill Lowman
It’s hard to choose any one.

I travel a lot and do a lot of banquets now. I’ve got a poem about me coming back from Yankton, South Dakota into Belle Fourche, South Dakota on a Sunday night. I had to be in the Bowman, North Dakota area on Monday morning at daylight to look at a horse 'cause these people had to be in Dickinson to a meeting or something. And the poetry after we get into it we can have basic truth, and then we have a license to stretch the truth a little as an artist.

They say a good poem doesn’t need an explanation so you know what you’re in for. Okay? This was at Bowman, North Dakota. This happened 10 or 15 years ago at Bowman, North Dakota. They opened a brand new sales livestock sales pavilion. The people running that sales pavilion leased it, and they come from South Dakota down in the edge of the Black Hills, and they would drive up for daylight on Monday morning and get the facility opened up and stuff, and this is the first year that sales pavilion was in Bowman. I had to be there to look at the horse and stuff in Bowman, North Dakota area coming up from Belle Fourche.

And I call this poem "Injustice."

"I was holdin’ her to the right side of 80, but the ground still rolled by slow with a half an hour to get there and still 75 miles to go. When a pickup done barreled on by me ‘bout 10 miles north of Belle, but with 200,000 on my ole rig I was already rattling the gates of hell. Then suddenly pride returned to my corner, and to myself I said, ‘It’ll be good to have a pilot car and flesh out the Smokies ahead.’ So I built into the floorboard and coaxed out five more miles an hour in hopes she’d all hold together as my neck snapped with such surge of power. When out of that lonely, dark morning an hour to the preside of daylight, a red light appeared in my mirror and rapidly came into sight. In an instant my heart had went skyward, but I was able to swallow it back. Then I eased her on down to 50 and figured I’d throw those troopers some slack to go by and run down the leader. I chuckled at his troubles ahead. I couldn’t believe it. When I pulled over, that trooper swung in behind me instead. I protested his display of injustice of how the lead man got away. But he just smiled as he wrote out my ticket. Then I heard him say, ‘To us this man is a hero, he brings revenue into our state. He works the sale every Monday at Bowman, and damn he sure is good bait."

So that’s how I do it. It’s a true story, and then you add a little to it so.

Prairie Public
You know I thought as you were saying it, this doesn’t need any explanation, but then the ending. Now which part of that is true?

Bill Lowman
Well I was speeding and got caught, but of course he didn’t say that. He was a little more professional than that. But we have fun at it. That’s my bottom line is. You know I’m a semi professional you might say. I make part of my living traveling and entertaining with it, but when I quit having fun at it, it’s time to stay home because then you’re not funny anymore. You’re not havin’ fun, and your public isn’t having fun. You have to be having fun on stage before your crowd is having fun.

Prairie Public
And you’re still having fun?

Bill Lowman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a recharge. We’re so busy at home. We’re managing time with our other three businesses that whenever I get a call to do a banquet, I drop whatever I’m doing and do that, and it’s a recharge. I lose money shutting the heavy equipment off, but I make money 'cause I’m fresher and more alert and more aggressive at what I’m doing to do it right, and so it’s a recharge. It’s a paid vacation.

Banquets are great. You get to cleanup, get a soup jacket on. You get to eat first. People see you at your best. You see them at your best. Then you’re gone. It’s great. What a life.

Prairie Public
And you paint and draw?

Bill Lowman
I’m an artist. I studied commercial art in Miami, Florida very seriously for two winters in the University of Miami. And I painted there and sculptured, and I didn’t have a studio when I come home so I picked up a pencil and drew, and I’ve sold like 300 originals around the country of pencil drawings, and then I have my own books out of writing so it compliments my writings good. So I’ve pretty much stuck to a pencil now because of my habitat here. But I took the artwork very seriously. The writing I haven’t got serious about it yet, and the writing is done more than the artwork.

Prairie Public
You think ranching is going to be okay, it’s going to come around its cycle. It may look different and the land may be owned by different people?

Bill Lowman
Yeah, well I have one thought on that, and I got that from a good friend of mine, and I think you’re going to cross his trail here shortly. My wife was raised south of Sentinel Butte on a ranch and good friends out there, their neighbors Sidney and Doris Connel. Sid told me when I started out. He was an old-timer then, and he’s still an old-timer. We’ve been ranching 30 some years. He told me that you can make it ranching in this country if you remember one thing, and that is that it isn’t the hard times that will get you, it’s the good times. And you can’t say it any plainer than that. And if it needs explaining to anybody, when credit’s good, don’t overuse your credit. Always manage to survive the hard times, and you will make it. If you manage to survive the good times, you will never make it. And that’s good advice. I bet we see too much of that nowadays. It’s too easy to want everything new right away.