Short Stuff: The Disappearance of Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce was a journalist and writer of short stories. He also disappeared rather mysteriously. Listen in and learn of the various theories on what happened to him. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Jerry over there. Everyone be quiet, let's get started.
Ambrose Beers goes missing. This is a good one. This
is so. Ambrose Beers was a writer, and he's described
in this article. And this is from the old friends
at how stuff works dot com. Oh yeah, good, good plug. Yeah.

(00:24):
They still have some great, great short content out there
that we can mind for these short stuffs. But he
has described here as equal parts Mark Twain and Edgar
Allan Poe is pretty good. Yeah. He was born in
Ohio in eighteen forty two, and he was a journalist
and like one of the big sort of early journalists
to kind of supposedly one of the first ones to
really make his byeline a brand in and of itself.

(00:47):
Oh yeah, but he also wrote horror stories. He wrote
horror short horror fiction. He wrote a lot of um.
He was kind of his generation's voice about how the
Civil War really was because he was one of the
few writers of his day who had actually fought in
the Civil War. That's right. I remember. The one that
comes to mind for most people, probably that you read
in school was an occurrence at al Creek Bridge. Great story. Yeah,

(01:09):
one of the classic American short stories of all time.
He also wrote The Devil's Dictionary, which was his own
take on words like um, ghosts are outward and visible
signs of inward fears, or peace is just a period
of cheating in between two periods of fighting. Just kind

(01:30):
of scathing, sarcastic, bitter takes on humanity. And to kind
of make it more succinct, I saw a Poetry Foundation
description of him said he was a committed opponent of hypocrisy, prejudice, corruption,
and had contempt for politics, religion, society, and conventional human values.

(01:50):
So he's our kind of guy about to say he
would really we should go get some coffee with him,
and he he would have been one of the great
American writers. A lot of people say he is, but
he would have been one of the widely known great
American writers had he ever gotten a novel together. But
he didn't. He was a columnist, he was a short
story writer, he was a correspondent, but he never made

(02:11):
became a novelist. And he was partially bitter. He was
bitter in part because of that. So when this article
says he was a novelist that is a lie. Yes, Okay,
So this dude named Don Swam wrote a book called
The Assassination of Ambrose Beers colon. When is someone going
to write a book without a colon? I think we

(02:33):
need to colin a love story. And he seems to
be sort of the guy who really is I think
he runs a website on Ambrose Beers, is really carrying
this torch forward for this person? And what's interesting beyond
the life of Ambrose Beers is the disappearance and mysterious
death of Ambrose Beers. Yeah. I was reading an l

(02:55):
A Times article about this very thing, and they said
that Ambrose Beers would have become a totally obscure American writer.
I'm not sure if that's true had he not made
a great career choice at the end where he put
a shroud of mystery over his own demise. That's what happened.

(03:17):
No one knows what happened to Ambrose Beers. He disappeared
and was never heard from. Starting in December of n Yeah,
there are there are a bunch of theories, and we're
gonna throw some of them out there. Um over the
next seven or eight minutes. One of them, is that
he loved the Grand Canyon, and he loved it so much.
He loved it like air wolf. He loved it so

(03:39):
much that he wanted to become a part of it
and leaped to his death. Uh, and went there to
to leap to his death and die by suicide. That's
one which is believable, as as we'll see you later on,
it's plausible. Um. But the the main story, the one
that most historians will point to as the story of

(04:00):
what happened to him, is that in December of nine
he left California to go down to Mexico to find
Poncho Villa, who was one of three leaders of the
Mexican Revolution um down there at the time, and that
he either wanted to write a book about Poncho Villa,

(04:21):
write some articles about him, or he wanted to take
up arms alongside Poncho Villa because he was an old
Confederate war vett who had nothing to lose at this point.
He was a bitter, old drunk who had an acerbic
wit and bitter take on everything. Um. And that is
actually not totally out of the realm of possibility for
why he was going down there. But the through The

(04:44):
common general story is that he went down to Mexico
to hang out with Poncho Villa for one reason or another,
and that he was never heard from again at the age.
So should we take a break, Ye, all right, We'll
come right back and talk a little bit about what
people speculate happened south of a border stop. Mm hm alright.

(05:24):
So there are a lot. I mean, it seems like
it's really hard to get a beat, a read, a
beat on this a bead, because everything that seems like
it might have really happened is disputed by somebody. It's
not just that chuck in addition to that, or the
reason the reason why it's disputed by somebody is because

(05:46):
he almost You get the impression that he went to
the trouble of setting it up so that his disappearance
would be a mystery that no one would ever be
able to figure it out. Perhaps, And it's also clear
that in nineteen thirteen it was a lot easier to
disap Pierre and no one ever knows what happens to
you just and then he's gone. So it is generally believed, though,

(06:07):
that he did go to Mexico, and he did uh
ride with Poncho Villas, a seventy one year old Civil
War veteran. It's just not um proven out exactly why
he was there or how he necessarily died there, right right,
Some people say firing squad, yes, which is supported by
this letter. So his last letter was posted from Chihuahua, Mexico,

(06:31):
which is where Poncho Villa was stationed in carrying out
his his arm of the revolution. So we made it
as far as Poncho Villa's home territory. Supposedly. Some people
don't even believe that that's true, but that's where the
last known letter from ambro Beers was postmarked, was Chihuahua, Mexico.
And in this letter he says, goodbye. If you hear
of my being stood up against the Mexican stone wall

(06:53):
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 on the cellar stairs
to be a gringo in Mexico. Ah, that is euthanasia.
So this is the last letter he has, and he's
in Chihuahua, Mexico, and then no one ever hears f
him again. And he was going down to hang out
with Poncho Villa. That would support the idea that he

(07:13):
died at the hands of either Poncho Villa or maybe
the Federals who Poncho Villa was fighting. Right. There are
also people skeptics that say, you know, there really was
no letter um and there was a notebook that belonged
to a secretary that had a summary of a purported letter.
Oh really, yeah, but I mean heard that one. I
think the man who wrote the book, Mr Swain, says

(07:36):
there was a literal letter, right, That's what I've heard,
So I'm not sure how that can be up for debate.
Some people say that he had somebody take the letter
down to Chihuahua, because you can give someone a letter,
give him some money to take it down, and then
have them mail it from Chiuauwa. Just because that last
letter was posted from Chihuahua does not indisputably prove that

(07:56):
Ambrose Beers was in Chihuahua at the end of ten
that's right. There are some other people that said there's
a priest named James Lenert who says that he was
executed by firing squad uh and this was in um
Sierra Mohata and that he never made it to Chihuahua. Yeah,
and that would have been the federal troops in a

(08:17):
mine in a mining camp who found out he was
going to aid ponto Villa and kill him. The idea
that he died at either the hands of or the
order of Poncho Villa came from a guy named Adolf
Danziger de Castro who wrote a very obscure biography in
on Ambrose Beers, and in it he was one of

(08:39):
De Castro was one of Ambrose Beers's drinking buddies. He
said that he went down to Mexico and had dinner
with Poncho Villa to find out what had happened to
Ambrose Beers and eventually coaxed from Poncho Villa that Ambrose
Beers had died because he had gone drinking and criticizing
Poncho Villa in punch of He didn't like that, and

(09:01):
so he was killed because he ran he shot his
mouth off, which was very believable. Yeah, it's entirely possible.
And the fact that this guy knew him. Uh, A
lot of historians say this seems authentic. That's really possible
that that happened. There was also a journalist named Jake
Silverstein and early two thousand's that said, Uh, he got

(09:22):
into this theory that he never made it to Mexico
and he died in Texas. Uh. He dug up a
letter to the editor of a little newspaper in Marfa,
Texas from a man who said, he's buried here in
an unmarked grave because I picked up a hitchhiker once
who fought for the federal forces, the Mexican federal forces
when he's a teenager. And he said that he picked

(09:46):
up an old gringo who called himself Ambrosia, and uh,
he said, hey, can you pay me to get me
back into the US. And during this trip he talked
about books that he had written, and one had the
word devil in the title. And he died of pneumonia
in nineteen fourteen and was buried in Marfa, Texas. Mhm, okay,

(10:07):
that's just as legitimate as anything else. What about the
one that he actually he like like somebody was saying
that he gave the letter to somebody else to post
from Chihuahua and he went to the Grand Canyon and
died by suicide. That that was how he died, and
that he was throwing everybody off the trail. This one
is actually supported by a couple of things. His son

(10:27):
um died by suicide. He spoke of suicide as a
noble out that it was somebody's right to make that choice.
And then also, Um he did a tour of Civil
War battlefields in the United States right before he went
to Mexico, So it's possible that he was in the
kind of mindset that he would have been in to

(10:49):
to take his own life. Who knows, but that's a
I mean, that's why we'll probably never know what happened
to him. Because each of these is really plausible, and
each of them can be not constructed but arrivaled by
the next theory too. None of the theories are just
like outlandish, They're all pretty pretty reasonable and supported by
some factor other. Yeah, and there was one final one

(11:11):
that this is from Swain's book, that Beer's actually went
to Mexico and fought and lived and then retired to
Saratoga Springs, New York, where he fell in love and
then died of asthma. And that was of course entirely fiction,
I think so, right, Yeah, because that was his book
was the Ambrose Beer's love story was fiction, and I
think that's what happens to him in the book. You

(11:33):
know that movie, you know, the movie Old Gringo with
Gregory Peck that came out Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda
and Jimmy Smits. It reimagines Ambrose Beers's death at the
hands of one of ponto Villa's generals, shot in the
back and supposedly from dust till Don three, not supposedly.
I never saw it, but that tackles ambro Beers. Ambro Beers,

(11:57):
he's a character in it. Yeah, and I think he
lives in in that in Old gringoy Dies. Well, if
you know what happened Ambrose Beers, we want to know
about it. You can send us a message to Stuff
Podcasts at I heeart radio dot com and uh, I
think that's it right, that's it. Well, then short stuff
is out. Stuff you Should Know is a production of

(12:21):
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