I’m not sure how exciting writing about Bowman will be for the fans. The town probably has a population of something like 2000 people, it has just a few restaurants, two grocery stores, and only a couple dozen businesses in town. Most of the residences work on the ranches and farms that surround the town. So why did we stop there? Well, like Bismarck, my brother and I have a lot of history there. Only in Bowman the history is a little deeper, I think it was my great great great grandfather from Norway who settled there a long time ago and acquired some land to work. So the land has been passed down generation after generation and has been divided and divided, but now my brother and I own a few sections of the original Roen land that has been in the family so long. My grandfather and my dad both worked on the ranch for many long and hard years so it has always been very important to our family. A funny story happened when we went to the local western store. We got to chatting with the clerk and eventually she wondered why we were in town, we said to visit our land and our family heritage, she said what family, we said the Roen’s…she said, oh yeah I knew them well, Leland (our grandfather) sang at my wedding. I don’t know if that’s a tribute to how well the Roen’s are known in the Bowman area or to how small Bowman is, but either way it was fun to know that people still remembered our family. So we picked up a couple pairs of Wranglers from the western store and headed out to the ranch to explore a bit. It was nice to be back out there, the land is pretty cool, and surprisingly there is a good diversity of landscape on our piece of land. Check out the pictures if you want to see what I’m talking about. Anyway, Bowman was nice and it was great to be back in town. We also had a nice bite to eat with Carl who had worked with my grandpa for 30 years or so and who knew the land and our family very well. Although we didn’t spend much time in Bowman we did get to see a large chunk of the land as well as nearly the entire city. It was a good time, but we were in a hurry to get back to Seattle, but not before a stop in Yellowstone.

- Carson

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 9:28 pm and is filed under National Permiter Tour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.