David Hunter Strother was an American journalist, artist, brevet Brigadier General, innkeeper, politician and diplomat from West Virginia. Both before and after the American Civil War, Strother was a successful 19th-century American magazine illustrator and writer, popularly known by his pseudonym, "Porte Crayon". He helped his father operate a 400-guest hotel at Berkeley Springs which was the only spa accessible by rail in the mid-Atlantic states. A Union topographer and nominal cavalry commander during the war, Strother rose to the rank of brevet Brigadier General of Volunteers, and afterward restructured the Virginia Military Institute, as well as served as U.S. consul to Mexico.