Short Stuff: The Disappearance of Ambrose Bierce

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. 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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, 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

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