“If you do, you are going to be disappointed; he is not like other boys. He is more like his grandfather than little David Clark. He is not contentious, yet without apparent effort, for the mere asking, he seems to have his way with other children. Though he is just seven and wanders about the mountain side alone, I am not worried. When I remonstrated, he replied with calm assurance: ‘Mother, you need not worry, I will not get hurt, I am learning things;’ I have come to believe that what he said is true. I asked why he climbed out upon the Pinnacle Rock and he answered: ‘When on the big rock, I think and learn and see things I cannot here. I see earth and heaven as one great whole.’ The boy seems not to mind in the least being alone; though he often acts as guide for one of the older boys to the rock, any one of whom will quit his games to go. Several [pg 105] times when he went off alone, I followed and unseen watched him climb carefully to the Pinnacle, where, finding a seat not too near the edge, he sat looking out over the Valley and seemed to dream in wide-eyed wonder. The birds flew about as though he were not there; and the little ground squirrels that burrow in the rocks came out and sat up and rubbed their faces and combed their bushy tails within a foot of his hand. When he rose up to come home he held out his little hands towards the valley as though he would take all that he saw within his tiny arms saying: ‘O the joy of it! the joy of it!’ What are we to do with a boy like that? Let us watch over him carefully and let us follow the way God leads. Sometime have him tell you what he sees.”
He began making his little journeys to the rocks when he was five years old; first with his mother or Ruth, then alone. Each day from the spring of 1773 until the following May, his little feet wore a distinct and narrow path from the kitchen door to his aerie. The people of the Valley seeing the little boy on the big rock, called it John Calvin’s Rock; and it is so called to this day, though very few know the reason. A local historian writing of the early Presbyterian settlements of the Valley, making fact fit theory, refers to the rock as having in some unknown way been called after the father of Calvinism.
Mr. Campbell first made the acquaintance of Thomas Fairfax and his wife on the trip to Winchester in 1771, stopping at their plantation on his way from the Hite settlement. This acquaintance, renewed at the meeting house, had ripened into a warm friendship mainly through Dorothy’s instrumentality; who, beginning with the peep hole conversation three years before, insisted on talking with John Calvin every time she saw him.
[pg 106] The two families occasionally lunched together in the church grove; or if it rained, the Fairfaxes spent the night with the Campbells, as the distance to Greenaway Court was great.
The two men for more than a year had planned a bear hunt in the Kanawha cliffs and at last Mr. Fairfax had come to the plantation for that purpose, bringing his wife and little Dorothy, who were to remain with Mrs. Campbell.
He and Mr. Campbell, accompanied by two servants and half a dozen dogs, crossing over the mountains, camped on the benches overlooking the wilderness of the Kanawha.
One day, Mr. Campbell with his servant, John Mason, went down into the river meadows hunting for deer, and while quietly stalking, themselves unperceived, saw three Indians traveling the path towards the settlement. As small parties occasionally visited them or hunted in the valley of the Kanawha, it never occurred to him that it was a war party; nor were they decorated with pigments and root stain as a war party.
When he got back to camp he told of seeing the Indians; whereupon Mr. Fairfax suggested they better return home as he had heard just before leaving Winchester of trouble between the whites and Indians, growing out of the recent killing of the Logan family by Captain Cresap and his men at the mouth of Yellow Creek.
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The morning after Dorothy’s arrival, John Calvin started for school, nearly two miles away. Dorothy, who, since the day she had commanded him to peep through the hole, had continued issuing her commands, demanded to accompany him and had her way as usual. She insisted on sitting with him in the boys’ room. There they [pg 107] sat together and studied and recited from the same primer. Dorothy could read almost as well as the boy; but he knew all the Shorter Catechism, while she knew only the first three pages.