Episode 148: The Devil’s Journalist: Ambrose Bierce and His Disappearance

Ambrose Bierce lived a life as sharp and uncompromising as the words he put to the page. Born in a log cabin in Ohio in 1842, the tenth of thirteen children, he grew up in poverty but in a household steeped in books and ideas. His childhood was marked by the rigid religiosity of his family, something that left him skeptical, intolerant of hypocrisy, and deeply critical of “Puritan values” throughout his career.

At eighteen, Bierce enlisted in the Union Army and fought in some of the Civil War’s most harrowing battles, including Shiloh and Chickamauga. His service as a topographical engineer honed the detached, surveyor’s eye that would later define his prose. A near-fatal head wound at Kennesaw Mountain in 1864 scarred him for life, both physically and psychologically. As Bierce himself later suggested, those war years remained the most intense and defining period of his life.

After the war, he moved west, where San Francisco’s booming press scene gave him a new battlefield. Bierce became notorious for his fearless journalism and merciless satire, especially in his “Prattle” columns. He skewered corrupt politicians, railroad tycoons, and pompous public figures with wit that was closer to Juvenal than to gentle ribbing. His fiction, meanwhile, veered toward the grotesque and uncanny—war tales of chilling clarity, ghost stories that blurred reality with nightmare, and the biting epigrams collected in The Devil’s Dictionary. Between Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, few writers loom larger in the lineage of American horror and the weird.

But it is Bierce’s disappearance that has overshadowed his legacy. In 1913, at seventy-one years old, he left Washington, D.C., toured Civil War battlefields one last time, and then crossed into Mexico at the height of its revolution. Reports placed him with Pancho Villa’s army, observing the Battle of Tierra Blanca, before traveling south to Chihuahua. His last known letter, dated December 26, 1913, ended ominously: “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.” After that, he vanished.

What became of him is one of American literature’s great unsolved mysteries. Some say he was executed by firing squad in Sierra Mojada. Others believe he slipped back into the United States, dying anonymously in Texas. Still others argue he sought oblivion in the Grand Canyon, a place he loved. Without evidence, his fate remains speculation, but that very uncertainty has kept his name alive.

Ambrose Bierce may not enjoy the instant recognition of Poe or Twain, but his influence is undeniable. H. L. Mencken praised his Civil War sketches as the finest ever written. Writers like Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway echoed his clipped, unsentimental style. And The Devil’s Dictionary continues to be quoted more than a century later.

In the end, Bierce’s disappearance feels like the last story he never had to write—ambiguous, unsettling, and unforgettable. Whether he died in Mexico, in Texas, or in the silent depths of the Grand Canyon, he achieved a rare kind of immortality. Ambrose Bierce walked into history’s shadows, and he never walked back out.