All of these stories are available at archive.org, please consider using them to read these stories. The only difference is I've turned all of the text notes into a web page that's easier to navigate, and will also be indexed by the search engines as well, making them more widely available.
Thank you Jodey Bateman for your incredible labor of LOVE! All interviews with Rainbow Family Folks conducted between 1977 and 2008. Scans made in 2018.
The people in this section of the book became involved with Rainbow at the first gathering in 1972 near Granby, Colorado. Most of them have gone on to play conspicuous roles in Rainbow.
The narrators of these stories tell of all varieties of scenes - a cross-section of Rainbow … from the road people of the Peace Camp in the account by Carlos to the largely upper middle class All One Family mentioned by Medicine Story and Red Dave.
There is much here that could be cross-referenced to help make a definitive history of the counter-culture. For example, JaySun tells about setting up the first People's Park in Berkeley in April and May, 1969. In the previous section, Sunny tells about being there for the second attempt at People's Park in September, 1970. Later on in this book, Billy Star shows in his account how People's Park became a permanent Berkeley institution in the late Seventies.
These are accounts by young people who were born into Rainbow children of parents who have been involved in Rainbow. I interviewed these young people at the 1998 Gathering in Arizona.
Chronic runaways, abused children, drug addicts, people with severe mental and physical illnesses … in this section are examples of how these people find help for their problems in Rainbow and find a new dignity and hope.
Foxfire and Grey Eagle both remember U.S. society before World War II … long before most Rainbow people were born. Tisa was part of an early sixties scene that is ancient history for many in Rainbow. And although Sarra is considerably younger than the first three, she grew up in a vigorous wide open Communist Party subculture in Canada of a sort that had long vanished in the United States so that to her, the left wing is not something that began on college campuses in the late sixties as it is for so many in the USA. Thus Sarra has a "long view" … a memory of a world that survived much longer in Canada than it did in this country.
At the opposite extreme from STP was Eden Hot Springs, also known as Healing Waters, a place that was a center for the kind of people who are sometimes derisively called "high holy hippie elders." There was a run-down old hotel at the springs near Safford, Arizona. Stephen Gold rented the hotel probably around the beginning of 1975. He remodeled it and opened it up as a hip resort. He held several Healing Gatherings there out of which the All One Family was founded a group which placed great emphasis on herbal and psychic healing.
The main difference between Eden's Healing Gatherings and the Rainbow Gathering was that you had to pay to go to Eden. Also no meat was to be consumed on the premises. Some of the hard-core "road dogs" in Rainbow used to make a point of trying to get into Eden free and eating meat there. Finally Eden had to close because of the hepatitis epidemic described by Red Dave. Later Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones bought the place for the use of his family and friends.
Flowering Tree is in some ways like the inhabitants of a Pawnee Indian earth lodge. In Gene Weltfish's words, "The personal (of the earth lodge) was likely to change from season to season." A group of people, fluctuating in size and composition calls itself Flowering Tree and tries to travel together and find land to rent or caretake. When Flowering Tree has land, then to a lesser extent than the old-time Pawnees, the Flowering Tree household "within itself produces the whole material and social base for an ongoing community." These accounts were taken down at the Oregon Rainbow Gathering in the summer of 1978 and the Arizona Rainbow Gathering, summer 1979.