I grew up in Casper, Wyoming, a place that, as one might expect from the hometown of Dick Cheney, wasn't exactly a site of peace and solace. Legend has it that the Native Americans opted not to settle the area as the winds there cause madness -- ok, my friends and I might've invented that legend. But there was definitely something about the history -- politically, socially, and environmentally -- of the oil industry that made us all a little crazy.

To escape, we'd head to the mountain. It's a short drive -- just up Wolcott to Casper Mountain Road. Unlike Wyoming's more well-known Teton Mountains, Casper Mountain is old, its buttes rounded with age. If Casper itself (due to oil or wind or Dick Cheney's legacy) is ugly and profane, the mountain is beautiful, sacred.

The land itself warrants this. Memories add to it. But I believe the stories told by Elizabeth "Neal" Forsling about the folklore of the mountain seal solidify this. Forsling homesteaded what is now Crimson Dawn Park in the 1930s. An artist and author, she crafted an elaborate lore for the mountain -- that the mountain was inhabited by witches -- and drew into her tales the Casper community, culminating every year in a ritual on the Summer Solstice.

"Pagans and Pioneers: Celebrating the Summer Solstice in Casper, Wyoming," an essay on Forsling and the Summer Solstice celebration on Casper Mountain was my first academic paper, presented at the American Folklore Society meeting in 1999. At the time, no formal research had been done on Forsling. I poured through old newspaper articles housed in a manilla folder at Casper College Library in order to document the event and the community's response to it.

I posted a copy of my essay online, and from time to time, Casper residents past and present would stumble upon it. They'd send me emails, thanking me for writing about Forsling, commenting on how much they'd loved Crimson Dawn and the stories Forsling had told. Since I wrote my essay, filmmaker Karen Snyder made a documentary on Forsling -- A Woman to Match a Mountain. (You can view an excerpt on YouTube here).

As I start to repost my academic work here, it seems fitting to start with this one on Forsling. Wyoming -- for better or worse -- is my roots. And Forsling has always exemplified to me a woman who can defy convention in order to make a space for her vision and her art.

Pagans and Pioneers: Celebrating the Summer Solstice in Casper, Wyoming

On the far eastern side of Casper Mountain ?? some thirteen miles from downtown Casper, Wyoming ?? is the Red Butte. Here, the earth is deep red, shaded by tall pines and clusters of aspens. The view to the south opens onto a sagebrush covered valley, across to Muddy Mountain and beyond to the Deer Creeks, the Pedros, and the vast plains. In the midst of this spectacular landscape is Crimson Dawn Park. The site was originally the homestead of Elizabeth Neal Forsling and her family. In June of 1930, Forsling held a party with a few mountain neighbors in honor of Midsummer's Eve. Neal Forsling was a gifted storyteller and in order to entertain her daughters and friends, told tales of a pantheon of witches, elves, and forest spirits that once inhabited the mountain. Forsling has shared her stories with the Casper community, and the Midsummer's Eve event has involved three generations of area residents. Twenty shrines dedicated to the likes of the Topaz Witch, the Emerald Witch, the Blind Minstrel, and the Phantom Woodchopper now line a well?worn path through the trees. On Midsummer's Eve, the crowd weaves along the trail, pausing to hear a story recounted at each shrine.

On the surface, the pagan celebration at Crimson Dawn seems incongruous with the conservative cowboy culture of Wyoming. Yet few area residents seem to be concerned with the content or themes of the annual event. Quite to the contrary, hundreds attend each year, and the community has continued to observe Midsummer's Eve long after the death of Forsling in 1977. As the Midsummer's Eve celebration has grown and changed over the years, so too have the meaning and significance of the event to the residents of Casper. The symbols and motifs employed in the celebration are mutable. They have meant various things to the different people who have observed, participated in, and heard about the event. There is no one meaning of Crimson Dawn. According to folklorist Beverly Stoeltje, festivals occur at calendrically regulated intervals and are public in nature, participatory in ethos, complex in structure, and multiple in voice, scene, and purpose.[1] This paper will explore the complex and multiple meanings of Crimson Dawn and the Midsummer's Eve celebration, on both an individual and a community level. The legends associated with Crimson Dawn and Neal Forsling have many layers of meaning: from the use of and reaction to the Witch motif, to insinuation and action about ecology and community, to the classification or invention of a pioneer or Old West theme. This paper suggests that these varied interpretations of the site and the celebration help ameliorate the contradictions between the pagan ritual and the right?wing background in which it is enacted. Indeed, the changing interpretations are essential to lure and survival of the Crimson Dawn tradition.

Download the full article: http://audreywatters.com/crimsondawn.pdf