The Fairfax family, in 1782, moved from Greenaway Court to Jackson River, where Captain Fairfax bought an extensive boundary on the edge of the Valley between the Preston farm and the Campbell plantation. The three families were inseparable and visited at all hours without the slightest formality.
Captain Fairfax and his wife said that Dorothy had made them move to the Valley and tried to tease her by telling John he was the attraction. The two children treated the jest in the most matter-of-fact way, Dorothy saying: “He is almost as dear to me as you and father are,” and John, that: “I am very glad that Dorothy lives so near, she is the best friend I ever had.” Theirs was a close friendship of more than ten years, beginning [pg 160] almost in infancy with never a thought about the relations of the future.
They were much together, frequently visiting John Calvin Rock, where they would take their books and spend the whole afternoon. He would read aloud or write for her what she called prose poems; little practical essays on everyday things, yet possessed of a spirit of individual mysticism and beauty of thought. Considering them her greatest treasures they were carried home and locked up in a small cabinet of inlaid woods, which had belonged to her distinguished and aristocratic uncle, Lord Fairfax.
The two were as dissimilar in disposition and appearance as possible. She was petite, inclined to be innocently giddy; quick with tears of sympathy and capable of making one forget his sorrows by her chirpy gladness; yet as John knew, a very sensible girl when confronted by something of importance.
He was tall for his age with big hands and feet; and apparently, though not in reality, clumsy. His light hair was always in wavy, riotous disorder. He loved the solitudes of the mountain and the great forest beyond, and spent much of his time climbing over the mountain and in long tramps through the forest. He never carried a gun, refusing to kill any wild thing, and wearing his girdle, had no fear of the Indians. He told Dorothy that when alone he could almost touch the wild deer or walk into the midst of a drove of turkeys; and if in his rambles he came upon timber wolves or bear, they passed him without showing either concern or friendliness.
He was uniformly courteous to every one; yet his only intimates were his own family, including the servants of the household, Dorothy, the school master and [pg 161] his daughter, the Clarks and a few silent Indian friends, who whenever they passed through the settlement called at the Pinnacle and talked with him.
When one of the tribe into which he had been adopted visited him he always sent remembrances to Tecumseh and the Prophet, the woman who had nursed him in his strange illness and the medicine man whose tattooing probably had caused it; and to John Mason, who for eight years had been a missionary with the Ohio tribes, he wrote long letters and sent a book or two at every opportunity. Strange that this man so land hungry; so possessed with the dominant Anglo-Saxon passion of land ownership, as to have sold himself for five years in order that he might pay his passage to America, expecting there to become a freeholder and a gentleman farmer; at the expiration of his servitude had chosen to become a missionary to the Indians and never, even to his intimates, mentioned the dream of his earlier days.
The Indians marked the boundary of the Campbell plantation and the mountain trail passing it with the Mingo sign of ownership and the sign name and office of John Calvin, to protect it from Indian depredation. Their friendliness while partly due to Mason’s unselfish service and because they were kind and respectfully received and entertained at the plantation, in the main was a tribute to John Calvin, to whom they paid reverence as a chief and as a member of the Mingo priesthood. He was called in the Indian tongue, Chief Cross-Bearer, because of the tattooed marks on his chest, which as he grew seemed to grow not only in size but the more vividly manifest.
The Indians, deep students of nature and attributing to the Great Spirit a closer fellowship with men than did the white men and possessing therefore a more intimate [pg 162] or innate insight into the spiritual phases of life, saw and appreciated that John Calvin felt yet deeper these spiritual phases and was gifted with an inexplicable capacity, rarely given man, for grasping the teachings and purposes of the Great Spirit; though his scarcely definable gift was as yet unsuspected by him.
Even they did not know that when he came into a room where some one was ill and raving in delirium, the ravings ceased; and that when he placed his hands, which were cool and dry and pleasant to the touch, upon a person suffering with pain or fever the pain or fever departed for the time and the patient usually slept. This had first been noticed by his mother and Dorothy, though neither mentioned it.