Did Ambrose Bierce Disappear On Purpose?

When Ambrose Beers disappeared, many people thought the controversial writer had been executed by revolutionaries in Mexico. But some researchers believe he met an even more tragic end. Ambrose Beers was one of the most prominent journalists of the Gilded Age and has since garnered a reputation among the finest American literary minds.

 A true polymath and prolific wordssmith, Beerus’s life would end with a mysterious disappearance that echoed the surprise endings of his own works of fiction. By the time he was born in 1842, the Beeruses had been in the new world for generations, having first arrived in the Puritan migrations of the mid600s. Ambrose had a notable disregard for his familial history.

 Later in life, he would often write critically of Puritan values, feeling they hampered progress. His parents, Marcus and Laura, were both very literary and instilled in Ambrose his deep passion for reading and writing. As a result, he committed his life to the craft at a young age. The plucky young man was eager to get a start in the world of writing.

 At the age of 15, he left home and took a job as a printer’s apprentice with a small paper, the Northern Indiana. Notably, the paper was an abolitionist one. And such values may have inspired Beers to take up arms. With the outbreak of the American Civil War, he immediately enlisted in the Union Army.

 As part of the 9inth Indiana Infantry, he was involved in several dramatic operations, including the first organized land operation of the conflict, the Battle of Philippi. Ambrose proved to be a courageous presence on the battlefield. During the Battle of Rich Mountain, he rescued a gravely wounded comrade under heavy fire.

 The Daring Escapade received newspaper coverage, and he was widely praised for his actions. But he didn’t romanticize his service in the slightest. In April 1862, he fought in the grizzly battle of Shiloh, a terrifying conflict with huge numbers of casualties. It was a traumatic experience for Beerus, and he later used his terror in the battle as the basis for several short stories and his memoir, What I Saw of Shiloh.

After being promoted to first lieutenant, he received a new assignment as a topographer, making maps of potential battlefields, he proved skilled at the task and enjoyed the unsupervised roaming of the countryside that the job permitted him. At the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in June of 1864, Beer sustained a traumatic brain injury that left him out of commission for the rest of the summer.

 Even after returning to active duty, issues arising from the injury continued to plague him, resulting in his resignation in January 1865. After this, he would never be the same. On top of his lifelong asthma, health complications stemming from his injury plagued Beers for the remainder of his days, specifically fainting episodes and general irritability.

But despite this, his service wasn’t over yet. He resumed his military career for one more assignment in mid 1866, where he joined a cross-country expedition to inspect outposts across the Great Plains. Traveling by horseback and wagon, his journey ended in San Francisco at the close of 1866, and he quickly took to his new surroundings.

Beers permanently resigned from the Union Army after the expedition and settled in San Francisco. There he built his profile as a newspaper contributor and editor for numerous publications. In 1873, he moved to England, living there for the next 3 years. He became a regular contributor to Fun magazine. It was a London publisher who combined a selection of Beerus’s articles into his first book, The Fiend’s Delight, published under the pseudonym Dodd Grill.

 But soon home was beckoning the ambitious writer. After his return to San Francisco, Beerus’s journalism career exploded. He became the editor of the Wasp magazine, where he penned a regular column. He also became an early and regular contributor to William Randph Hurst’s newspaper, The San Francisco Examiner. Hurst was a wealthy and prominent publisher who was in the process of building a media empire.

Hurst dispatched Beer to Washington DC in January 1896 to investigate corruption in business and government. The US Congress had approved large loans to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad Companies to build a transcontinental railroad. However, one of the company’s executives had persuaded a member of Congress to introduce a bill excusing the companies from repaying the astoundingly high $130 million loans.

 The railroad executives had hoped this plot would unfold in secret, but Beerus’s reporting shed light on the scandal and attracted much public attention. Hoping to sweep it under the rug, an executive confronted Beers on the steps of the US capital and attempted to bribe him, asking him to name his price. Beers’s response received wide publication across the country. My price is $130 million.

 If when you’re ready to pay, I happen to be out of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the treasurer of the United States. The executive’s bill was defeated, and Beerus finally found his place. He returned to California in November of that year, but his experiences in Washington had rubbed off on him. In 1899, he moved back to the nation’s capital, where he would live for the rest of his life.

 Waiting further into political reporting, he made a name for himself. His brand of journalism made him feared among the elite and powerful in the United States. Indeed, he soon gained a reputation as one of the most prominent and influential reporters in the country, and he often ruffled some powerful feathers.

 His talent for biting social commentary sometimes got him into trouble, and many of his columns were met with a hostile reaction. having crossed paths with many notable people in his lifetime. Most accounts paint a picture of a man with a vivid personality and a scathing wit. While today Beerus is best known as a titan of American literature, this was not the case in his day.

 In fact, his celebrity during his lifetime was almost solely because of his journalism career. His fiction writing didn’t make a splash with contemporary audiences of the era. Despite the lukewarm public reception to his fiction, he was a dazzlingly prolific writer. In fact, he wrote his most popular stories and a rapid period of creativity between 1888 and 1891.

 And while audiences hardly noticed, critics, both contemporary and modern, gave him his dues, crediting Beerus as a pioneer of realist fiction. He wrote vividly on a variety of versatile topics and his themes often had to do with the enigmatic character of the universe and the farcical nature of human existence and there was one topic for which he drew on direct experience.

Ambrose Beers was infamous for his unvarnished writing of the horrors of warfare. Having seen terrible things while serving in the Union Army, he wrote many grimly realistic fictionalized stories of his experiences, and many are among his most well- reggarded. Beers had no patience for those who romanticized conflict.

 One of his most famous anti-war stories is an occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a harrowing account of conflict. Many consider it one of the finest short stories in American literature and it holds the honor of being one of the most anthologized in history. Critics also hail Beers as one of America’s finest ever satists.

 His biting commentary was a prominent feature of his journalism and one of his most famous works. The devil’s dictionary which lampun political double talk and jargon of the era is considered a great work of satire in its own right. Further displaying his versatility, he also gained notoriety for his skill in writing horror.

 Indeed, some have ranked him among the early greats of the era, akin to Edgar Allan Poe. One critic even credits Beers with pioneering the psychological horror genre. He cemented his horror credentials when he attracted the praise of HP Lovecraft, one of the most influential horror writers of all time.

 In Lovecraft’s essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, the iconic writer praised Beers by name, calling his fiction grim and savage and lauding his stories as marquee examples of weird fiction. Beers was also a notably talented poet and he published several volumes of verse during his lifetime. He didn’t hold back on the grotesquery here either, as evidenced particularly in his grim collection, Fantastic Fables.

 He struck fear into the hearts of his contemporaries, but not just with his own talent. He would often publish his own reviews of the works of other writers and people listened. He became a very influential and feared literary critic. Beers had married Molly Day on Christmas Day in 1871. The couple had three children, two sons, and a daughter.

Tragically though, Beerus would outlive his sons, both of whom were plagued with personal issues. His younger son Lee died from alcoholism related pneumonia. His elder son Day had a flare for the dramatic and it ended up being his downfall. After a romantic rejection, he tried to kill his would-be lover and her fianceé.

 Luckily for them, he was unsuccessful. De then turned the firearm on himself. His parents’ marriage could not weather the pain. In 1888, Beers discovered compromising letters sent to his wife from an admirer suggesting infidelity. The couple separated and following their son’s demise the following year. Their marriage never truly recovered.

 They officially divorced in 1904 and Molly died a year later. With all this misfortune, it was little wonder that Beerus was something of a kermagin. If one quality of his writing and personality stands out, it’s his misanthropy. Many critics noted how his works featured a common vein of general contempt for humanity, a hopeless cynicism that man had any redeeming qualities.

 This stretched to matters of spirituality as well. Beers was an open and outspoken agnostic for the entirety of his adult life, an uncommon position to make public at the time. Along with his rejection of Puritan values, he also strongly contested the divinity of Christ. Perhaps anyone would have trouble believing if they’d experienced what he did on the battlefield.

In 1913, Beerus was 71 years old and evidently getting nostalgic for the past. In October of that year, he departed his home in Washington, DC, intending to tour all the old battlefields from his army days. He would never return. By December, he’d passed through Louisiana and Texas and headed down into Mexico.

 The country was in the throws of revolution at the time and before crossing the border, Beerus told reporters he was eager to get firstirhand experience of the upheaval. He reportedly linked up with Panchcho Via’s army as an observer in Huarez and they headed for Chihuahua. We know this because the writer kept correspondence with close friends and family all the while.

 On December 26th, 1913, he sent a letter to a friend that stated, “I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination. This communication would be his last.” Beers was never heard from again, seemingly vanishing without trace. When he departed on his journey, Beerus seemed generally fed up with life and indeed seemed to welcome the prospect of never returning.

 In one of his final correspondences, he even expressed something resembling excitement about the certain danger he faced. He wrote, “If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it’s a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.

” It’s not unlikely that Beerus met this very fate, but there are darker theories. Investigators found little trace of Beers, but they did find a notebook belonging to his secretary. From this evidence, noted skeptic Joe Nicl concluded that Beers had in fact deliberately concealed his whereabouts and further theorized that the writer took his own life in the Grand Canyon.

Because of Beerus’s notoriety and status as a US citizen, the US console launched an official investigation into his disappearance. The only relatively conclusive fact they could deem from questioning Panchcho via’s men was that Beerus was last seen in Chihuahua in January 1914. The fascination with Beerus’s disappearance and indeed with his character in general has become a common focus for fiction writers.

 He’s been fictionalized in over 50 movies, novels, plays, short stories, and TV shows. Of the writers that have cited Beerus as a direct influence, many of them have become notable figures in their own right, including Ray Bradbury, Ernest Hemingway, and Curt Vonagget. His echoing through time is perhaps his greatest legacy.

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