“Death is not the end,”
Ambrose Bierce wrote. “There remains the litigation over the estate.” The cynical Bierce, satirist,
short-story writer, and columnist for William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper
empire, met a mysterious death in Mexico at the age of seventy-one—or did
he? His actual fate has never been
known, though many stories abound.
Bierce was born June 24,
1842, in a log cabin in Meigs County, Ohio, to a poor but literary family that
saw to it that he had a proper high school education. He was the youngest of ten children—all of whom were given
first names starting with “A.” The
family moved to Indiana, where Ambrose took a series of jobs, as a printer’s
devil, a brickyard laborer, and a retail clerk.
In 1861 he enlisted as a
private in the Indiana Volunteers and served with distinction as part of the
Union army in the Civil War. At war’s end, he was discharged as a brevet major.
He then found work as a Treasury agent, as an engineering attaché for an
expedition through Indian territory, and finally as a watchman for the U. S.
Mint in San Francisco. He also began to write and saw the publication of poems,
articles, and short stories before becoming a full-time journalist.
Bierce married Mollie Day
in 1871 and resigned his newspaper job, taking his new wife to England, where
they remained for four years, as Bierce continued to flourish in the literary
world. They had two sons in England, and upon their return to San Francisco in
1875, a daughter was born.
During the next several
years Bierce held several jobs with the Assay Office, a mining company, and two
newspapers. In 1887, he joined Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner as a columnist. In 1888 he
separated from Mollie, after discovering some compromising letters she had
exchanged with a male admirer. He
continued his newspaper work and also published the satire for which he is most
famous, The Devil’s Dictionary, which
is filled with cynical definitions such as:
Grave, n. A place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the
medical student.
Funeral, n. A pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead
by enriching the undertaker, and strengthen our grief by an expenditure that
deepens our groans and doubles our tears.
Faith, n. Belief without evidence in
what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and
Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Marriage, n. A household consisting of a
master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
From the cynical tone of
his definitions, one may correctly conclude that Bierce remained an agnostic in
matters of religion. He once said, “Camels and Christians accept their burden
kneeling.”
Bierce later wrote for
Hearst’s Cosmopolitan magazine, from
which he finally resigned in 1908, saying of his employer, “Nobody but God
loved him.”
In 1913, when he was seventy-one, Bierce decided to
go to back to England, by way of Mexico and South America. By this time his
divorce from Mollie was final, and his two sons had both died, one by suicide in
a lovers’ triangle and one from alcoholism. Bierce intended to write about the
legendary Mexican bandit and revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. He wrote to his
niece on October 2, ““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, and falling down the cellar
stairs. To be a Gringo in
Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia!”
On November 6, he wrote to his niece, from Laredo, Texas, "...don't know where I shall be
next. Guess it doesn't matter much. Adios.”
Bierce
crossed the international bridge from El Paso to Juarez on November 26 and then signed on as
an observer in Villa’s army. On December 26 he mailed a letter from Chihuahua to his secretary/companion, Carrie Christiansen,
saying he expected to go the next day to Ojinaga, where Pancho Villa's
revolutionaries were poised to attack federal troops—and that was the
last anyone ever heard from him.
Many stories arose to
explain his whereabouts: he had been shot in battle, he had committed suicide,
he was confined in an insane asylum, he had made his way to Europe and was
living there incognito. Most likely, he was shot by soldiers, possibly by
Villa’s men—because, according to one account, he drank too much of their tequila.
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