Ambrose Bierce

In the autumn of 1913, one of the most famous writers in America set out on a journey he seemed to suspect he would never come back from.

Ambrose Bierce was seventy-one years old. He was a Civil War veteran, a celebrated short story writer, a feared newspaper columnist, and one of the sharpest, most cynical minds of his age. He had written stories about ghosts, death, madness and war that are still read today. His acid wit had earned him the nickname “Bitter Bierce.”

He told friends he was going to Mexico, where a revolution was raging, to see it for himself. He wrote to a friend that if they heard of his being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, they should know that he thought it a pretty good way to depart this life — better than old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.

He crossed the border in late 1913. He was never seen again.

The Soldier

Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842 in a log cabin in Meigs County, Ohio, the tenth of thirteen children in a poor, religious farming family. He grew up mostly in Indiana. He left home as a teenager.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he enlisted in the Union Army. He fought for four years, in some of the bloodiest battles of the war: Shiloh, Stones River, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge. In 1864, at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia, he was shot in the head. He survived, but the wound troubled him for the rest of his life.

The war shaped everything he wrote. He had seen men die in every terrible way imaginable, and he never forgot it.

The Writer

After the war, Bierce moved to San Francisco and became a journalist. For decades, he wrote biting newspaper columns, many of them for William Randolph Hearst’s papers, savaging politicians, businessmen, preachers and other writers. He was feared and admired in equal measure.

He also wrote short stories, many of them about war and the supernatural, that made him famous. The most celebrated is “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” the story of a Confederate sympathizer who is being hanged from a bridge by Union soldiers and seems to escape — until the last line reveals that the escape was only a vision in the final instant before his death. He also wrote ghost stories, horror stories, and The Devil’s Dictionary, a collection of witty, cynical definitions that is still quoted today.

The Sorrows

His personal life was full of loss. He married and had three children. His marriage fell apart. His older son, Day, was killed at sixteen in a shootout over a girl in 1889. His younger son, Leigh, died of pneumonia in 1901, his health ruined by drinking. Bierce and his wife separated, and she died in 1905.

By 1913, he was old, tired and, by his own account, ready for one last adventure.

The Last Journey

In October 1913, Bierce set out on a long tour of the Civil War battlefields where he had fought as a young man — Chickamauga, Shiloh, Stones River. Then he traveled to New Orleans and on to Texas, crossing into Mexico at El Paso in late November or early December.

Mexico was in the middle of a violent revolution. Rebel armies were fighting against the government of the dictator Victoriano Huerta. One of the most famous rebel leaders was Francisco “Pancho” Villa, whose army controlled much of northern Mexico.

Bierce went to join Villa’s forces as an observer. According to his letters, he traveled with the rebel army and witnessed at least one battle.

The Last Letter

His last known letter was written on December 26, 1913, from the city of Chihuahua, to his secretary and companion, Carrie Christiansen. He wrote that he was leaving the next day for an unknown destination.

That’s the last word anyone ever had from Ambrose Bierce.

The Search

When months passed without word from him, his daughter and friends became alarmed. They asked the U.S. government for help. American officials and newspapers made inquiries in Mexico. No trace of him was found. No grave. No witness who could say for sure what had happened.

The Theories

Over the following century, many theories were proposed.

He was killed in battle. Some believe Bierce died during the siege of Ojinaga, a border town where Villa’s forces fought government troops in early January 1914. Bierce, an old soldier, might have been caught up in the fighting.

He was executed. Some stories claim that Bierce, who was outspoken and critical, quarreled with Villa or his officers, or was mistaken for a spy, and was shot by a firing squad. One tale claims he was executed in a small mountain town, and that the villagers buried him there.

He never went to Mexico at all. A few researchers have argued that Bierce’s trip to Mexico was a ruse, and that he actually went to the Grand Canyon, a place he loved, and took his own life there, far from anyone who knew him. There’s no evidence for this theory, and the letters from Mexico suggest otherwise.

None of these theories has ever been proven.

The Writer’s Ending

There’s something almost unbearably fitting about the way Ambrose Bierce disappeared.

He was a writer who spent his life writing about death — about soldiers dying on battlefields, about ghosts and apparitions, about the strange, thin line between life and its ending. His most famous story is about a man who imagines his escape in the final moment before death. And then he walked into a war in a foreign country, at seventy-one, and vanished, leaving behind no body, no grave, and no ending at all.

I like to think he would have appreciated the irony. He might even have written it that way.