Original publish date September 26, 2024. https://weeklyview.net/2024/09/26/where-did-you-go-ambrose-bierce/
110 years ago last week, one of the most famous journalists you’ve never heard of disappeared from the face of the earth. Sometime between September 18-24, 1914, Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was reported missing. And of course, he had Hoosier ties. Less than two weeks after the start of the Civil War, Bierce enlisted with the 9th Indiana on April 24, 1861, in Elkhart, Indiana. Bierce was born in a log cabin at Horse Cave Creek in Meigs County, Ohio, on June 24, 1842. Horse Cave Creek, “a religious settlement” southeast of Columbus, Ohio, is long gone. Bierce was the tenth of thirteen children, all of whom were given names by their father beginning with the letter “A”. As a child, Bierce moved from the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio to the lake country of northern Indiana. His parents were a poor but literary couple who instilled in him a deep love for books and writing. Bierce grew up in Kosciusko County, Indiana, attending high school at the county seat in Warsaw. He left home in 1857 at age 15 to become a “printer’s devil” at a small abolitionist newspaper in Warsaw: the Northern Indianan. A printer’s devil was an indentured servant who performed many thankless tasks, including mixing tubs of ink and fetching type. Bierce was in good company: Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain were all printer’s devils.
While with the 9th Indiana, Bierce served in Western Virginia and was present at the Battle of Philippi (the first organized land action of the war in June of 1861). Bierce received his first media attention for his daring rescue, under fire, of a gravely wounded comrade at the Battle of Rich Mountain. Later, he fought at the Battle of Shiloh (April 1862), which he would write about in the memoir “What I Saw of Shiloh”. Within two years Bierce was serving on the staff of General Wm. Hazen. Here he became known to leading generals such as George H. Thomas and Oliver O. Howard, both of whom recommended him for admission to West Point in May 1864. General William T. Sherman also endorsed his application for admission. In June 1864, Bierce sustained a traumatic brain injury at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and spent the rest of the summer on furlough. By the end of the war, Bierce rejoined Gen. Hazen to inspect military outposts across the Great Plains, ending in San Francisco, where he was awarded the rank of brevet major before resigning from the Army.
Bierce remained in San Francisco for many years, becoming famous as a contributor or editor of newspapers and periodicals. He eventually graduated to the historical novels he is most remembered for today. His book The Devil’s Dictionary was named one of “The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature” by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. The book first took form as a serialized newspaper column before being published as a book. The book contains satirical definitions of English words that lampoon political double-talk. The book was volume seven of a twelve-volume set called “The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce” published from 1909 to 1912. Bierce was a pioneer in realist fiction, his horror writing prowess rivaled Edgar Allan Poe, and his satire equals his peer, Mark Twain. Bierce’s sharp tongue and penchant for biting social criticism and satire often placed him at odds with his publisher William Randolph Hearst. His poetry could be equally caustic as when one of his poems about the assassination of William McKinley in 1901 sparked a national outcry.
Bierce’s most notable work came at the close of the Gilded Age. From 1888 to 1891 he wrote a rapid succession of short stories centering around the inscrutability of the universe and the absurdity of death. Many of those realistic themes came from the terrible things Bierce had seen on the battlefield. His collection of 25 war stories including “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, “A Horseman in the Sky”, “One of the Missing”, and “Chickamauga” has been called “the greatest anti-war document in American literature”. Nothing infuriated Bierce more than hearing grandiose accounts of honor and glory of war from people who’d never seen or experienced it personally. His psychological horror story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been described as “one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature”, and his book “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians” was named by the Grolier Club one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900. Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King were among the many he influenced.
BIerce’s “Fantastic Fables” book and his many ghost stories were the precursors of the grotesquerie that became a more common genre in the 20th century. Bierce liked nothing better than to shock his audience by challenging their minds on the way to a surprise ending. No better example can be found than his “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. Written in 1890 and set during the Civil War, the short story climaxes when Peyton Farquhar, a wealthy Alabama planter and slave owner, is about to be executed by hanging from a railroad bridge as a company of Union infantrymen guards the bridge to carry out the sentence. In his final moments, Farquhar thinks of his wife and children but is suddenly distracted by an unbearably loud clanging. It is the ticking of his watch. He ponders the possibility of unfreeing his hands and jumping from the bridge to swim to safety, but the soldiers drop him off the bridge before he can act on the idea.
Farquhar flashes back to a time when he and his wife are relaxing at home one evening as a Rebel soldier rides up to the gate and tells Farquhar that Union troops have seized the Owl Creek railroad bridge. The soldier suggests that Farquhar might be able to burn the bridge down if he can slip past its guards. The soldier is in reality a Union scout setting a trap for Farquhar knowing that any civilian caught committing such an act will be hanged as a spy. Farquhar snaps back to the present and falls into the creek after the rope around his neck breaks. He frees his hands, pulls the noose off, and rises to the surface to begin his escape. He dodges, dives, and swims downstream to avoid rifle and cannon fire. Once out of range, he begins the frantic 30-mile journey back home. While Farquhar walks through endless forests day and night, he begins to hallucinate, seeing strange constellations and hearing whispered voices in an unknown language. He trudges on, driven by the thought of his wife and children despite the pain of his ordeal. The next morning he arrives at the gate to his plantation and rushes forward to embrace his wife, but before he touches her, he feels a heavy blow upon the back of his neck. There is a loud noise and a flash of white and “then all is darkness and silence!” Bierce reveals that Farquhar never escaped at all. His escape was an imagination, his journey home a momentary ripple in time experienced during the moment between his drop from the bridge and the noose breaking his neck.
Bierce continued writing and pushing the outside of the envelope for the rest of his life. Since much of Bierce’s writing centered on the Civil War, about a decade ago I asked National Parks Historian Emeritus Ed Bearrs about Bierce. I was sharing a beer with Mr. Bearrs in a hotel bar just after touring the Stone’s River battlefield between Murfreesboro and Nashville, Tennessee. Mr. Bearrs, who passed in 2020, was a man of few words. In this instance, he paused before answering, taking a pull from his bottle of Budweiser beer, and said, “What do I think of Ambrose Bierce? I think he was a grade-A Bull-sh_ _ artist.” Which elicited laughter from me and the few others at the table.
In 1913, at age seventy-one, he left Washington, D.C. to tour his old familiar Civil War battlefields. Within a short time, Bierce changed his mind and decided to chase Pancho Villa’s army to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. Bierce traveled to Mexico to witness (and some say become a part of) the revolution. By December he had passed through Louisiana and Texas, entering Mexico via El Paso. In Ciudad Juárez he joined Pancho Villa’s army as an observer, and in that role, he witnessed the Battle of Tierra Blanca. It was reported that Bierce accompanied Villa’s army as far as the city of Chihuahua. His last known communication with the world was a letter he wrote there to Blanche Partington, a close friend, dated December 26, 1913. After closing this letter by saying, “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.” And that was the last anyone ever heard of Ambrose Bierce. He vanished without a trace, one of the most famous disappearances in American literary history. No one knows where, when, or under what circumstances he met his end.
The U.S. consular opened an official investigation into the disappearance of one of its citizens. Some of Villa’s men were questioned but they all gave contradictory accounts. Local legend, documented by priest James Lienert, states that Bierce was executed by firing squad in the cemetery of the town of Sierra Mojada, Coahuila. Bierce’s ultimate fate remains a mystery. He wrote in one of his final letters: “Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico–ah, that is euthanasia!” His body was never recovered.
Alan E. Hunter 