Thomas M. Bowen

Thomas Mead Bowen (October 26, 1835 – December 30, 1906) was a state legislator in Iowa and Colorado, a Union Army officer during the American Civil War, a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, briefly the governor of Idaho Territory, an elected judge in Colorado and a United States senator from Colorado.

Biography Bowen was born near the present site of Burlington, Iowa, in what was then Michigan Territory, on October 26, 1835. He attended the public schools and the academy at Mount Pleasant, Iowa.

Career Bowen moved to Wayne County, Iowa, in 1856 and was a Democratic member of the Iowa House of Representatives that year. In 1858, he moved to Kansas. he was also a Reconstruction era justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court from 1867 to 1871.

Bowen, who made a large fortune in business, was appointed governor of Idaho Territory by U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant on April 19, 1871, but resigned on September 27, 1871, and returned to Arkansas. He moved to Colorado Territory in 1873 and resumed the practice of law. Bowen was elected judge of the Fourth Judicial District Court in Colorado, a position which he held from 1876 until 1880, when he suddenly resigned.

Bowen was a member of the Colorado House of Representatives in 1882 and resigned soon thereafter upon his election as a Republican to the United States Senate. He served in that body from March 4, 1883, to March 3, 1889. While in the Senate, he was chairman of the Committee on Mining (in the Forty-eighth Congress), Committee on Enrolled Bills (Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Congresses).

Death Bowen engaged in mining in Colorado and resided in Pueblo, where he died on December 30, 1906, at the age of seventy-one. He is interred at Roselawn Cemetery in Pueblo.