John Phoenix, Esq., the Veritable Squibob

📖 The Scoop

In the annals of American humor, early San Diego figures primarily as the setting for George Horatio Derby?s most famous practical joke. Derby, who produced comic essays, verse and drawings during the 1850?s under the pseudonyms of ?Squibob? and ?John Phoenix,? is the subject of this appreciative biography, first issued by Prof. Stewart in 1937 and once more available as part of Da Capo?s ?American Scene? series. To Stewart, Derby was interesting not only as a writer whose work enlivened San Francisco?s Pioneer, New York?s Knickerbocker, San Diego?s Herald and other journals, but also as a man whose private quips and semi-public pranks generated local legends wherever his twenty years of military service took him. As an officer in the Corps of Topographic Engineers, Derby was responsible for important mapping expeditions of the Sacramento Valley, the southern San Joaquin, and (most notably) the lower Colorado River; his engineering feats included light houses on the Gulf Coast, military roads in the Northwest, and ?Derby?s Dyke,? which re-directed an errant San Diego River to its original channel into False Bay. His writings and cartoons afforded a channel of a different sort for an irrepressible comic spirit which found little chance for legitimate exercise in the normal line of duty.

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