Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Disappearance of Ambrose Bierce

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

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.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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 howstuffworks.com. Oh yeah, good plug. Yeah, they still have some great, great short content out there that we can mine for these short stuffs.

Sure. But he's described here as Equal Parts Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. That's pretty good. Yeah, he was born in Ohio in 1842, 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 byline a brand in and of itself. Oh yeah. But he also wrote horror stories. He wrote horror, short horror fiction. Wrote a lot of, 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. Yeah. He also wrote the Devil's Dictionary, which was his own take on words like,

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. Yeah, that's what I was about to say. You should go get some coffee with him. And 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 never wrote a novel, huh? No, he was a columnist, he was a short story writer, he was a correspondent, but he never 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 Swame wrote a book called The Assassination of Ambrose Beers, Colin, when is someone gonna 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 LA 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. Wow. And that's what happened. No one knows what happened to Ambrose Beers. He disappeared and was never heard from, starting in December of 1913. Yeah, there are a bunch of theories

and we're gonna throw some of them out there 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 leapt to his death and went there to leap to his death and die by suicide.

That's one, which is believable as we'll see later on. It's plausible. But the main story, the one that most historians will point to as the story of what happened to him is that in December of 1913, he left California to go down to Mexico to find Pancho Villa who was one of three leaders of the Mexican Revolution down there at the time.

And that he either wanted to write a book about Pancho Villa, write some articles about him, or he wanted to take up arms alongside Pancho Villa because he was an old Confederate war vet who had nothing to lose at this point. He was a bitter old drunk who had an acerbic wit and bitter take on everything. And that is actually not totally out of the realm

of possibility for why he was going down there. But the common general story is that he went down to Mexico to hang out with Pancho Villa for one reason or another and that he was never heard from again. At the age of 71. Yeah. So should we take a break? Yes.

All right, we'll come right back and talk a little bit about what people speculate happened south of the border. Super obvious stuff, there's so much stuff that all the stuff you should know. Come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

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["I Heart Radio App"] All right, 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 beat. It's been a long day. Because everything that seems like it might've 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 1913, it was a lot easier to disappear

and no one ever knows what happens to you. Right, just, and then he's gone. So it is generally believed, though, that he did go to Mexico and he did ride with Pancho Vias, a 71-year-old Civil War veteran. It's just not proven out exactly why he was there or how he necessarily died there. Right, right.

Do people say firing squad? Yes, which is supported by this letter. So his last letter was posted from Chihuahua, Mexico, which is where Pancho Vias was stationed and carrying out his arm of the revolution. That's right. So he made it as far as Pancho Vias' 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 a Mexican stonewall 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 down 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 from him again, and he was going down to hang out with Pancho Vias. That would support the idea that he died at the hands of either Pancho Vias or maybe the federales who Pancho Vias was fighting.

Right, there are also people, skeptics that say, you know, there really was no letter, and there was a notebook that belonged to a secretary that had a summary of a purported letter. Oh, really? Yeah, but I haven't 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 them some money to take it down, and then have them mail it from Chihuahua. Just because that last letter was posted from Chihuahua

does not indisputably prove that Ambrose Beers was in Chihuahua at the end of 1913. That's right, there are some other people that said, there's a priest named James Leinert, who says that he was executed by firing squad, and this was in Sierra Mojada, and that he never made it to Chihuahua. Yeah, and that would have been the federal troops

in a mining camp who found out he was going to aid Pancho Villa and kill them. The idea that he died at either the hands of or the order of Pancho Villa came from a guy named Adolf Danziger De Castro, who wrote a very obscure biography in 1928 on Ambrose Beers. And in it, De Castro was one of Ambrose Beers' drinking buddies.

He said that he went down to Mexico and had dinner with Pancho Villa to find out what had happened to Ambrose Beers, and eventually coaxed from Pancho Villa that Ambrose Beers had died because he had gone drinking and criticizing Pancho Villa, and Pancho Villa didn't like that, and so he was killed because he shot his mouth off

while he was drunk. Which is very believable. Yeah, it's entirely possible. And the fact that this guy knew him, a lot of historians say this seems authentic. That's really possible that that happened. There was also a journalist named Jake Silverstein in early 2000s that said he got into this theory

that he never made it to Mexico and he died in Texas. 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 Mexican federal forces when he was a teenager, and he said that he picked up an old gringo

who called himself Ambrosia, and 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 that he died of pneumonia in 1914 and was buried in Marfa, Texas. Okay, that's just as legitimate as anything else.

What about the one that he actually, 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 was how he died, and that he was throwing everybody off the trail. This one's actually supported by a couple of things. His son died by suicide.

He spoke of suicide as a noble out that it was somebody's right to make that choice. And then also, 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 take his own life, who knows, but 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 deconstructed, but rivaled by the next theory too. None of the theories are just like outlandish. They're all pretty reasonable and supported by some fact or other. Yeah, and there was one final one that this is from Swain's book

that Beers 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 his book was, the Ambrose Beers love story was fiction, and I think that's what happens to him in the book.

Gotcha. You know that movie, you know the movie Old Gringo with Gregory Peck that came out in 1989? No. Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda and Jimmy Smits. Oh, wow. It reimagines Ambrose Beers' death at the hands of one of Pancho Villa's generals,

shot in the back. And supposedly from Dust Till Dawn III, not supposedly. No. I never saw it, but that tackles Ambrose Beers. He's a character in it. Yeah. And I think he lives in that. In Old Gringo, he dies.

Wow. Well, if you know what happened to Ambrose Beers, we want to know about it. You can send us a message to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. And I think that's it, right? That's it. Well, then, short stuff is out.

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