Book excerpt: George Horatio Derby (1823-1861) attended West Point 1842-1846. George met Charles and Martha Hitchcock. Their daughter was Lillie Hitchcock (Coit). The Hitchcocks and Samuel Clemens would be friends. Mark Twain would be affected by George Derby. The Hitchcock Legacy lives in The Charles and Martha Hitchcock Graduate Lectureship at U.C.Berkeley. The Lillie Hitchcock Coit Legacy is in the form of Coit Tower in San Francisco, The legacy of Sam Clemens is in the form of Mark Twain. The Legacy of George Horatio Derby is in the form of books- Phoenixiana and The Squibob Papers. His humor touched his contemporaries: General Winfield Scott, U.S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, W.T. Sherman, along with his classmates McClellan, Jackson, and Pickett. His legacy as a Topographical Engineer includes maps and surveys of California. He built five Lighthouses on the Alabama Gulf Coast. The major suspect in the cause of Derby's death is mercury poisoning.