Ambrose Bierce

1842-1914?

Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was born in Ohio on June 24, 1842. There are few details of his early life and one of his first jobs was for a small abolitionist newspaper in Indiana. His family had a history of military service and his grandfather had fought in the American Revolution. At the outbreak of the Civil War he enlisted in the 9th Indiana volunteers.

He worked mainly as an engineer and was present at Shiloh, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and Kennesaw Mountain. He received a serious head wound at Kennesaw Mountain and was mustered out of the army as unfit for military service.

Armchair psychiatrists theorize that the reason the 'Wild West' was wild in the late 1800’s was that large numbers of returning civil war veterans were suffering from what we now recognize as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). They no longer fit in at home and went west to find, or make, a place where they could find comfort. In any case, what Bierce had experienced during the war certainly had some profound effect on him and it seems reasonable to believe that this could be the source of his dark humor and deeply cynical nature.

In 1867, Bierce got a job working at the US Mint in San Francisco and, later, after deciding on a career in journalism, worked for a local news paper. His “Town Crier” column was sort of a combined investigative journalism and gossip colomn and gained him much local fame. In later life he had a rocky relationship with his boss William Randolph Hearst while working at the San Francisco Examiner.

The weirdest part of his life was the end of it. In 1914 he planned to tour the Civil War battlefields of his younger days and then cross the border into Mexico to report on the war being waged by the revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. He wrote a final letter to his daughter from Texas, crossed the border into Mexico, and was never heard from again.

One strange story tells of an ‘old gringo’ advisor in Pancho Villa’s camp. This became the basis of a movie out a few years back called “The Old Gringo”. In fact there is no definitive evidence of Bierce after the last letter he sent to his daughter before crossing the border into Mexico, and most historians believe Bierce was killed in that war-torn country sometime in late 1914.




Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
1842-1914?

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