Of course, the story that the manuscript was lost is simpler than any explanation of why she gave it to Hearst.

In 1909, Bierce spotted her [his daughter's]talent for marrying rich men, and made a will leaving everything to Carrie Christiansen. A photocopy survives at UCLA. It gives Carrie all his property and absolute discretion over his papers. Everything Helen got -- including the Laredo trunk, if there was one -- she got from Carrie.

When Bierce crossed the border, Americans had been watching the Mexican Revolution for three years -- some with enthusiasm and others with alarm. In 1910, Porfirio Diaz had been President of Mexico for thirty-four years. He was an authentic hero of the fight against the French Intervention, and he had presided over the modernization of his country -- financed largely by selling big chunks of it to foreign mining, ranching, and lumber companies. He had been criticized in the American press for shooting strikers and killing any peasants rash enough to complain about their condition. He had been defended by American publishers like William Randolph Hearst and Harrison Gray Otis, who had substantial personal empires in Mexican ranching, mining, and timber -- all bought cheap.

Because of some misguided chivalrous impulse, Diaz actually permitted an opposition candidate in the election of 1910.

This was Francisco I. Madero, a wealthy landowner from Coahuila. He ran on the ticket of the Anti-Reelection Party. Nobody knows if the contest that year was fair, but we do know that by polling time 60,000 of Madero's supporters were in jail. Luckily the PAR was a movement of the rich, so jail was the worst you could do to them. Madero himself escaped to Texas, where he organized an armed revolution. Lots of folks signed up with Madero who had more radical ambitions than he -- labor organizers, anarchists, and general purpose reds. By June 1911, almost in spite of himself, Madero was President. Diaz fled to Spain when he realized that his army was about 1/3 its official size. In those days, Mexican generals got a cash grant for feeding, outfitting and housing their troops. If somebody deserted, that was a little more money in the commander's pocket. He only had to ignore the fact. There was no standard uniform in the Mexican Army -- soldiers wore whatever clothes their Jefe had thought a bargain on his last trip to Europe.

When Madero took office he was obligated to a lot of people who had very different hopes of what the revolution would do -- the rich who had first backed him only wanted access to the national bureaucracy, previously the province of Diaz and a small circle of friends. But the commoners who had risked blood and bone wanted much more -- like legal trade unions, free education, clean water and sanitary sewers. With some time, Madero might have pleased everybody. But there was none. The peasants of Morelos, fighting under Zapata, would not give in. And the landowners of Chihuahua found that Pascual Orozco, the best of the guerilla revolutionary leaders, was for rent. Like Villa and some others, he was awarded 5,000 pesos for his service against Diaz. Unlike them, he considered this amount an insult. In the spring of 1912 he took to the field with a fine revolutionary program and lots of reactionary money.

Against Orozco, Madero sent the loyal forces of Pancho Villa and the Federal Army commanded by General Victoriano Huerta. These two did not get along. Huerta was a highly competent drunk. Folks said he hated all foreigners, except Hennessy and Martell. The bandit -- idealist Villa did not drink at all -- like Robert E. Lee, he did not trust himself to drink. By June 1912, Huerta was about to execute Villa for insubordination in a dispute over who owned a horse -- a thin pretense, for Mexican forces of all types were in the habit of taking any livestock and vehicles they needed. Villa had already tipped the firing squad when a telegram arrived from Madero ordering him back to Mexico City for trial.

Villa used his time in prison well,improving his reading and trying to learn to write. There was a lot of talent in that prison. For example, Gildardo Magana, one of Zapata's land-reform brain-thrusters, and General Bernardo Reyes, who was planning a coup against Madero that Villa was invited to join. But Pancho Villa was still loyal to Madero -- he escaped from prison and reached El Paso. From this exile he wrote letters to the governor of Chihuahua, Abraham Gonzales, reporting the plots he had heard. He prepared to fight again.

In February 1913, General Huerta seized power in a nasty coup that included the murder of Francisco Madero and his brother. Some said the American ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, knew all about it -- and encouraged it. perhaps.

In early March, Villa and eight men crossed the border.By the end of the year, those nine had organized a modern army that could beat anything in the Western Hemisphere. It was called the Division of the North. This was the military miracle Bierce wanted to see. In later years, after Villa became unpopular in America, some of Bierce's friends thought they had to defend him from any suggestion that he might have been impressed with this work. But when Bierce crossed, the top officers in the US Army already thought Villa an organizational genius and an honest man. That's what Bierce would have heard in the Army-Navy Club in Washington. When he stopped at Ft. Sam Houston, he would have heard more of the same -- from Frederick Funston, Hugh Scott, or Black Jack Pershing. At this point in the Mexican struggle, Villa had not been double-crossed a couple of times by Woodrow Wilson.

He hadn't committed any pointless atrocities against Americans. He was the US Army's golden boy.

The worst example of the efforts to clear Bierce of any sympathy with Villa is Walter Neale's "Life of Ambrose Bierce." Bierce's publisher had a lot of useful detail about him. But his view of the disappearance is that Ambrose snuck off to the Grand Canyon, found a deep cave, and shot himself. Neale argues that he never even entered Mexico, and hoaxed the whole world as a final joke.

You might wonder why this theory floated even for a moment, since AB wrote not just Christiansen, but Blanche Partington, from inside Mexico. Bierce himself made it plausible -- first, he was on the record as thinking suicide an honorable way of departing life. When he explained that he was going to Mexico (in part to check on the excesses of the Hearst press) all his friends told him it was dangerous -- and to all he replied that a man of 71 shouldn't be afraid of anything. He thought the normal pattern of dying in bed after sharing your suffering with loved ones very nasty. He thought a quick death best for everybody.

One sample from his letters is enough:

What an intolerable world this would be if we said nothing but what is worth saying! And did nothing foolish -- like going to Mexico and South America... Good-bye -- if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think that 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!

There are other quotes that parallel this one, from his last letter to Lora Bierce, his nephew's wife. None suggest suicide, all relate an acceptance of danger. From his stated attitude, it seems really unlikely that he would have hoaxed his friends and left them worrying. It would be more in character to explain exactly what he meant to do, then do it.

But Bierce did come from a journalistic culture that thought the hoax was an art form, not a crime. When our founding fathers decided to protect freedom of the press, nearly every newspaper was the captive of some local machine. Nobody read a paper with any hope that the contents were unbiased. Papers were supported by subscription, not advertising. If the editor got out of line, it was not the law of libel that worried him, but the Code of the Duel.

In the 1850s, New York City and some other places had enough literate population to support daily, non-partisan, newspapers. They were called "penny press." They made their money from street sales, not subs. It was easy for tradesmen to advertise in them, because the ad didn't indicate any factional support and alienate some of your customers. The publisher might fume away on the editorial page, but most of the sheets contained not polemic, but material useful and interesting to everyone.

Because these were dailies, it became important to beat the other paper to the story. Some enterprising writers noted quickly that this was easier if your tale was a total fraud. If you reported the first balloon crossing of the Atlantic, nobody could scoop you -- since it wasn't true. The first to work this angle was Edgar Allan Poe. Mark Twain explained his own classic hoax in "The Great Petrified Man." Twain's tale circled the globe a couple of times before running down. He established some ethical standards for the form, by including some details that should have alerted the rubes, but so subtly that they never noticed.

Bierce had played this game, too. Once there was a book called "The Dance of Death," which proposed that the waltz was a seditious conspiracy to undermine public morals. It described the dance in such lewd and graphic terms that some folks felt the protest was obscene even if the waltz was not. Ambrose was at least the editor, and some think he wrote it. He spent lots of ink denouncing it in his column, and the press run reached 18,000 copies -- a phenomenal success for the West Coast. The hoax was complete when someone [probably Bierce] wrote a rebuttal taking the original as good coin. Then the pranksters withdrew.

Even if we think Bierce was too considerate to hoax his friends, we have to notice that some writers who came up with solutions to his absence shared the same press traditions.

Take for example, George F. Weeks, an experienced California newsman who covered the Division of the North's advance to Torreon. After things settled down a little, Weeks became editor of "Mexican Review," an English-language organ of the Carranza presidency. Basically, they excerpted upbeat articles from the Mexican papers about progress and stability in Mexico, translated them into English, then shipped 15,000 copies a month, free, to US press clubs and public libraries. A solid, professional public relations organ.

The business manager was Edmundo Melero, who one day mentioned that he had seen Weeks at Villa's headquarters during the Torreon fight. Weeks didn't remember Melero there, but...

Weeks: "At once the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce came to mind. If you were in one of Villa's corps in the latter part of 1913 or early 1914, I wonder if by any possibility you ever ran across or heard anything of an American newspaper man and author named Ambrose Bierce, who was supposed to have been with the Constitutionalist forces about the time you mention. He has been missing ever since that time and I have tried in every possible way to learn something of his fate. I have sought in every direction, but have never even found anyone who knew him at the time he was in Mexico."

Melero: "Ambrose Bierce! Did I know him? I rather think I did! Why, we were good friends -- the best of friends! We used to talk together by the hour. He could speak no Spanish, and I was the only one here who spoke any English, and so we became fast friends. He was never weary of asking me questions about Mexico and the revolution, and I was never tired of giving him information and talking with him on all sorts of subjects. I never met a man I liked better. "

Melero didn't know what had happened to Bierce, but he promised Weeks that he would look up his old friends and ask them. Melero identified a photo of Ambrose, but this didn't prove much, for Bierce was well known in Mexico -- as shown by Crowell, of the Mexican Herald, spotting him in Laredo.

After some months, Melero brought in a friend who had been a sergeant under General Tomas Urbina, one of Villa's more flamboyant commanders. The sergeant related an incident in 1915 when Urbina's troops intercepted a mule train of munitions bound for the Carranzistas in Icamole. Everyone got away but one Mexican and one gringo. The gringo couldn't speak Spanish, so had little to say before both were executed. The sarge described Bierce well, and identified the same old photo that Weeks had been showing around for years-- but then, Weeks makes clear that Melero had described Bierce thoroughly before the sergeant remembered the incident.

I've taken this account from Weeks' autobiography, "California Copy," printed the year of his death, 1928. Earlier variations were printed in the New York World, 4 Feb 1919, under the byline of his friend, Robert H. Murray. In 1930, Carey McWilliams asked Murray about the tale, and Murray said that Weeks sincerely thought he had solved the mystery, and died in that belief.

The San Francisco Bulletin sent James Wilkins to Mexico City. He couldn't talk to Melero, who had died of pneumonia. The sergeant was still around, and told about the same story.

But there was still nothing to show he was talking about Bierce, instead of some other old gringo. Maybe Melero was truthful, and the sergeant stretching a bit. Many Americans were killed in that sad war, but the story was more negotiable if you could tack Bierce's name on the corpse.

Considering what sort of paper "Mexican Review" was, we have to note how well the story fits the politics of the times. It tars Villa a little, but only through Urbina, whom Villa had executed for banditry a couple of years before. By 1919, the Carranza government was trying to talk Villa into retirement. The story satisfies American curiosity without hampering any bargaining. Also associated with Mexican Review were Adolphe De Castro and Gaston De Prida. We will meet them in connection with other Bierce tales.

Two factors killed the Weeks tale for Vincent Starrett. First, it put the death during the time when Villa and Carranza were actually fighting each other. Until November 1914, after the Convention of Aguascalientes, they were allies against Huerta. Suspicion, but not hostility, separated them. Like other stories, this one would have us believe that Bierce didn't write home for ten months or more. Though mail and telegraph were often interrupted, they never stopped entirely, so a plausible theory ought to put Bierce's death much sooner after his last communications.

Second, Weeks said, he had heard from newsmen in El Paso that Bierce was in Mexico planning to join the rebel forces and to kill himself if he couldn't be useful. Pressed by Starrett for the source, he named Willis, of the NY Herald.

But Willis said he never talked to Bierce at all, and hadn't even known he was in the area. Starrett quit paying attention to Weeks, and advised Carrie Christiansen to do likewise.

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