George H. Derby

For the baseball player of the same name, see George Derby (baseball)

George Horatio Derby (April 3, 1823 – May 15, 1861) was an early California humorist. He attended West Point with Ulysses S. Grant. Derby used the pseudonym "John P. Squibob" and its variants "John Phoenix" and "Squibob." Derby served as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. In his spare time, he wrote humorous anecdotes and burlesques, often under the guise of his pseudonyms.

George Derby was born 1823 in Dedham, Massachusetts, son of John B. and Mary Townsend Derby. His father deserted the family mercantile business to be a poet, spending the family's money on self publishing. He graduated from West Point in 1846 and first served in the Mexican–American War at Vera Cruz and Cerro Gordo. According to the newly (2010) published Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. One, Ulysses S. Grant was a classmate of "Squibob's" and the General told Twain some stories of Squibob at West Point. However, according to the 1969 edition of "Register of Graduates and Former Cadets of the United States Military Academy," although their times at the Academy overlapped by a year, Grant and Derby were not actually classmates.

In 1853, Derby arrived in the small outpost of San Diego, California, to begin mapping the region and developing plans for redirecting the San Diego River from the marshy delta of San Diego Bay and directly into the Pacific Ocean. This was to avoid floods that periodically silted up the bay and made use of the bay by ships difficult or impossible.

Derby married Mary A. Coons on January 14, 1854 in San Francisco. His wife's family were wary of Derby because his erratic, flippant manner infuriated his superiors. Coons tricked Derby into marrying her by placing a notice in the San Francisco paper stating that she would depart with her mother back home to St. Louis, Missouri, although she had no intention to do so. Derby read the notice and immediately took a steamer from San Diego to marry her. They had two daughters, Daisy Peyton, born 1854 in San Francisco, who married William Murray Black, and Mary Townsend, born 1858 in Mobile, who did not marry; and one son, George McClellan, born 1856, aboard American ship in Pacific, who married Bessie Kidder.

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