Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

Between intervals of writing his tales, criticisms and epigrams, Bierce found time to manage ranches and mining properties, to fight bad men and frontier highwaymen, to grill politicians, and to write verse.

Bierce went through life seeking combat, weathering storm after storm, by some regarded as the foremost American literary man of his time, by others denounced as a brute, a pedant, even as a scoundrel. In the West he was generally lionized, in the East neglected. One man called him the last of the satirists, another considered him a strutting dunce. Bierce contributed to the confusion by making something of a riddle of himself. He loved mystery and indirection. He liked the fabulous stories which grew up about him and encouraged them by his own silence and air of concealment. In the essentials, however, he was no more than an intelligent and perspicacious man of high talent, who hated sentiment, reveled in the assault on popular prejudices, liked nothing so much as to throw himself upon the clay idols of the day with ferocious claws, and yet had a tender and humble heart.

Toward the end of 1913, Mexico was in another of its torments. The visionary Madero had been assassinated. Huerta was in the dictator’s chair, Wilson had inaugurated his “watchful waiting,” and the new rebels were moving in the north—Carranza and Villa. At the time Ambrose Bierce was living, more or less retired, in Washington, probably convinced that he had had his last fling, for he was already past seventy-two and “not so spry as he once had been.” But along came the order for the mobilization along the border. General Funston and his little army took up the patrol along the Rio Grande, the newspapers began to hint at a possible invasion of Mexico, and there was a stir of martial blood among the many.

Some say that when age comes on, a man’s youth is born again. Everything that belonged to the dawn becomes hallowed in the sunset of manhood. It must have been so with Bierce. Old and probably more infirm than he fancied, long written out, ready for sleep, the trumpets of Shiloh and Chickamauga, rusty and silent for fifty years, called him out again and he set out for Mexico, saying little to any one about his plans or intentions. Some believed that he was going down to the Rio Grande as a correspondent. Others said he planned to join the Constitutionalists as a military adviser. Either might have been true, for Bierce was as good an officer as a writer. He knew both games from the roots up.

Even the preliminary movements of the man are a little hazy, but apparently he went first to his old home in California and then down to the border. He did not stop there, for in the fall of 1913 he was reported to have crossed into Mexico, and in January his secretary in Washington, Miss Carrie Christianson, received a letter from him postmarked in Chihuahua.

Then followed a long silence. Miss Christianson expected to hear again within a month. When no letter came, she wondered, but was not alarmed. Bierce was a man of irregular habits. He was down there in a war-torn country, moving about in the wilderness with armies and bands of insurgents; he might not be able to get a letter through the lines. There was no reason to feel special apprehension. In September, 1914, however, Bierce’s daughter, Mrs. H. D. Cowden of Bloomington, Illinois, decided that something must be amiss, no word having come from her father in eight months. She appealed to the State Department at Washington, saying that she feared for his life.

~~ AMBROSE BIERCE ~~

The Department quickly notified the American chargé d’affaires in Mexico to make inquiries and the War Department shortly afterwards instructed General Funston to send word along his lines and to communicate with the Mexican commanders opposite him, asking for Bierce. The Washington officials soon notified Mrs. Cowden that a search was being made. General Funston also answered that he was proceeding with an inquiry. Again some months elapsed. Finally both the diplomatic and the military forces reported that they had been unable to find Bierce or any trace of him. Probably, it was added, he was with one of the independent rebel commands in the mountains and out of touch with the border or the main forces of the Constitutionalists.

Now the rumoring began. First came the report that Bierce had really gone to Mexico to join Villa, whose reputation as a guerrilla fighter had attracted the veteran, and whose emissaries were said to have asked Bierce to join the so-called bandit as a military aide. Bierce, it was reported, had joined Villa and had been with that commander in Chihuahua just before the battle there, in which the rebel forces were unsuccessful. Possibly Bierce had fallen in action. This story was soon discarded on the ground that Villa, had Bierce been on his staff, would certainly have reported the death of so widely-known a man and one so close to himself.