By Robert Yarbrough
Article revised and first published in Vol. 32, 2014-2015
As noted in Time magazine, one of the most famous American disappearances concerns the American author Ambrose Bierce, an author of exceeding popularity between 1880 and 1910. Bierce supposedly disappeared into Mexico and the Mexican Revolution during the end of 1913 or the beginning of 1914. According to Bierce biographers after his disappearance, Bierce was last seen in the United States in El Paso, Texas.
Bierce was born in a log cabin in rural Ohio (he later describes his parents as "unwashed savages"). At 15, he became a printer's apprentice on a small newspaper. He enlisted in the Union Army very early in the Civil War and was quickly promoted to lieutenant. His experiences in the Civil War later provided material for his many war and horror stories. According to various sources, Bierce eventually became a captain or a major in the army.
The army sent Bierce to the West on a military assignment, and he remained in San Francisco. He started writing for various newspapers, including William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner. During his career as a writer, many considered him a master of the English language.
Image caption: Ambrose Bierce disappeared during the Mexican Revolution. (file image)
Bierce was one of the most famous journalists of the 1800s, a short story writer of war and other horror stories, a literary critic, and a bitter cynic and misanthropist. He kept a human skull and a cigar box of (supposedly) an enemy's ashes on his desk. His contemporaries named him "Bitter Bierce" with his constant motto, "Nothing matters." Ambrose Bierce He wrote the often-anthologized short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." He also wrote the well-known book The Devil's Dictionary, entries accompanied by humorous pseudonyms.
His definition for DEAD, adj., reads:
Done with the work of breathing;
done With all the world;
the mad race run
Though to the end;
the golden goal
Attained and found to be a hole! --Squatol Johnes
Many movies resulted from both Bierce's stories and his life. Several versions of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" were produced, a French version winning both an award from the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award and later appearing in the United States as an episode of the Twilight Zone.
Several more of his stories became short videos. Bierce provided the principal character of two movies set in Mexico - Carlos Fuentes' Old Gringo and Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter.
Bierce left several clues behind as to his plans to disappear in Mexico. "Good-bye - if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs," he writes in a letter to his niece, Lora. A close associate of Bierce reportedly received a letter with a postmark from Ciudad Chihuahua, Mexico. The letter states, "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination."
Nobody ever received any communication from Bierce after that. In 1914, the U.S. State Department searched for Bierce in Mexico. Several articles appeared in American newspapers about Bierce's execution by firing squad in Mexico, but a body was never found.
Eventually, theories grew about Bierce. One article in a newspaper placed him in France fighting for the Allies. There was the story of Bierce and a crystal skull. Another story put him in a South American jungle dressed in animal skins. The possibility of alien abduction was mentioned. Some Bierce biographers suggested a more practical way to disappear - suicide.
Various writers soon after Bierce's disappearance and even into contemporary times have linked Bierce to El Paso, Texas. Most of the accounts of Bierce's disappearance mention El Paso. According to experts, El Paso was Bierce's departure place for Mexico and the Mexican Revolution nearly a century ago.
In Ambrose Bierce: A Biography, Carrey McWilliams writes, "He proceeded on to El Paso and passed across the line into Juarez." Paul Fatout, a Bierce scholar of the 1950s, notes,
"Later in November the traveler moved on to El Paso, where international relations were so friendly that crossing the border was relatively simple."
Richard O'Connor states in his Ambrose Bierce biography, "Late in November he finally crossed the border at Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso." Roy Morris, in his Bierce biography Alone in Bad Company, observes:
However, Bierce's statement to the journalists in El Paso is entirely consistent with his characteristic doublespeak throughout his Mexican venture. First, he announces that he is going to Mexico, then he qualifies his statement with an ominous reference to his likely fate. When he told the porch sitters at El Paso that he was either going to join Villa's army or else crawl off into the mountains and die, he might have been telling them the truth.
Walter Neale, in his 1929 biography Life of Ambrose Bierce, notes, "His last letters to me were written in December 1913. He first wrote from Galveston; next from San Antonio, and a few days later from Laredo, Texas." He continues, "I know he greatly desired to visit both Eagle Pass and El Paso."
One of the last famous authors to write about this unsolved disappearance is Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, who found the story of Bierce's disappearance very appealing. Fuentes writes in his novel The Old Gringo, "He [Bierce] got off the train in El Paso, carrying his folding black suitcase, what they called a Gladstone then, and dressed all in black except for the white expanse of cuffs and shirtfront."
One hundred years later, nothing more is known about the final story of Bierce than was learned immediately after he vanished. Many scholars and investigators over the century have found nothing conclusive about his disappearance. It appears that this mystery will never be solved definitively. And to this day, nobody has found conclusive evidence that Bierce visited El Paso. Even though one of the biographers mentions Bierce had spoken with some El Paso journalists, there does not seem to be any mention of Bierce being in El Paso in the local papers of the late months of 1913.
Does the connection between El Paso and Ambrose Bierce exist? The biographers during the first half of the 20th century think so. After a century, the case has grown very cold. Still, fans are observing the 100th anniversary of his disappearance.
A last note: Some of Bierce's biographers mention suicide. Are his sun-bleached skeleton and a rusty pistol yet to be found somewhere in the canyons of the Franklin Mountains?
Ambrose Bierce : a biography by 
