Lt. George Horatio Derby (1823-1861)
Hardship, avarice and isolation. These were among the companions of many early American settlers after they reached California. These grim sidekicks help explain why newcomers placed a premium on humor. And the appreciation of it explains why so many of them began to enjoy the wit and, when they were played on others, the practical jokes of Lieutenant George Horatio Derby.
He was one of California's first humorists. And as with nearly all luminaries, fictitious stories sprouted about him. One dealt with the reason for his transfer West. Headquarters assigned him, so the tale goes, to survey the Tombigbee River "to see how far up it runs.' Lt. Derby supposedly responded in great detail how he had studied the river and its adjoining topography. He even interviewed settlers along the river's banks in Alabama and Mississippi.
"My conclusion," he wrote, "is that the Tombigbee River does not run up, but down!
Secretary of War Jefferson Davis reportedly was not amused. Soon the lieutenant was sweating with General Bennett Riley and his men exploring the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. Then on to even hotter terrain - Fort Yuma in California's Imperial County, just across the border from Yuma, Arizona. His "exile" there didn't diminish his penchant for practical jokes and witticisms.
"One of our Fort Yuma men died," Derby would tell newcomers, "and unfortunately went to hell. He wasn't there one day before he telegraphed for his blankets."
Cooler climes didn't change him. At a rousing ball in Sonoma, Derby's brainstorm was to switch two babies and their toys and blankets into each others basket, so their parents took home the wrong infants after the party ended. Owen Wister borrowed the incident for use in his novel The Virginian, according to the entertaining John Phoenix, Esq., which George R. Stewart chose as the title of Derby's biography.
Derby transferred to San Diego shortly before he turned thirty. Word soon circulated that he was building a dike alongside the San Diego River instead of across it, perhaps as revenge for his transfer.
This project wasn't a joke, though. A crackerjack engineer in the United States Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, Derby was following orders to shift the river back to its original bed and thus solve the silt build-up in the harbor.
He supplemented his Army pay with surveying jobs so that he and Mary Coons could marry in 1854. The record fads to show what pranks were played on the newlyweds, but like so many practical jokers, Derby failed to see the humor in it when the joke was on him.
0ne idea occurred to him before riding in a carriage with two other passengers. He confided to each of them in turn, "Oh, by the way, our other passenger is almost stone deaf" Then he sat back poker-faced during the shouting match that followed.
With a young man named James Sherman as his accomplice, Derby set up Don Julio Carillo of Sonora, a man who heard the pair extolling the Masons. "I would like to join," said Carillo. "Fine," Derby said, "but you realize all new members must be branded with a new steel branding iron?" Carillo considered this a moment, then agreed, saying, "Esta bueno."
Sherman rounded up the branding iron plus a piece of cowhide with hair on it. He blindfolded the don, but not until the initiate had seen the iron turn red in the forge. Derby threw the cowhide into the flames for a suitable aroma and pressed the branding iron onto Carillo. He had, however, first inserted a piece of wet paper between the skin and the iron. So the victim felt the heat but escaped a burn. "Es bastante," Carillo bravely cried. When he saw his unblemished skin he was prepared to announce a miracle.
The lieutenant defused one near-calamity. Two associates decided a duel would settle their argument, so Derby molded their bullets out of tallow and added charcoal for color. Instead of killing or maiming each other, the opponents simply splattered themselves.
Derby was born in Massachusetts in 1823. His deviltry surfaced in an austere, pious but loving home atmosphere. During three years in a boy's academy, a harsh superintendent tried unsuccessfully to beat the bent for jokes out of him.
Writing proved another source of income for the lowly paid lieutenant. His newspaper columns ended up in book form and both Phoenixiana and The Squibob Papers enjoyed good sales until their characters and topical references became outdated. His writing skill served Derby well in August 1853 when John Judson Ames, editor of the weekly four-page San Diego Herald, asked him to keep an eye on things at the paper while he went to a Democratic Party meeting in San Francisco.
Soon editorial page readers who had been urged to elect the Democratic candidate for governor found themselves being asked to switch their support to the Whig candidate, one William Waldo, who later ended up carrying San Diego, much to Ames' discomfiture.
Derby predicted in print what the future held for him when the six-foot, six-inch Ames returned: 'We held (Ames) down over the press by our nose (which we had inserted between his teeth for that purpose) and while our hair was employed in holding one of his hands, we held the other in our left and ... shouted to him, 'Say Waldo!'"
Derby surveyed military roads in Oregon and Washington Territory. He wrote, "It rains incessantly twenty-six hours a day for seventeen months of the year."
Next he headed for New York in 1856 where, despite illness and partial blindness, he managed to play a few more pranks. After his death in 1861 at the age of thirty-eight, a friend had this to say: 'What other men would sacrifice for ambition, for love, for the attainment of fortune or personal aggrandizement, he would sacrifice for fun-his best friend would have no more chance of escape than his worst enemy."
[biographical sketch from San Diego Originals by Theodore W. Fuller, published by California Profiles Publications, 1987]
The Library of Congress now has an on-line edition of Derby's Phoenixiana in the American Memory project.
More about Derby from The Museum of the City of San Francisco
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