A view of the headstone of Ambrose Bierce in Oakwood Cemetery in Warsaw.

By Shari Benyousky
Photographs by Tony Garza

WARSAW – My mouth dropped open as I saw that the World’s Greatest Curmudgeon had also been an extraordinarily handsome man. The black and white photo did not lie.

Although I had not heard about him, in 1868 the face, talents, and sardonic wit of Warsaw, Ind., native Ambrose Bierce were legendary. I closed the history book and made a phone call to someone who might help me find out more.

The search for local traces of the world-famous Bierce had brought me to another of the world’s most interesting men. The man who sat across the table from me in his home south of Warsaw could have been Bierce’s brother. Both are/were tall, athletic, handsome, and unquenchably curious.

Joe Shepherd has uncanny similarities to Ambrose Bierce. Both men thirst for adventure and new experiences. Joe Shepherd has been a town marshal, an auctioneer, an EMT, a teacher, a coach, and a famous treasure diver. Ambrose Bierce had been a captain in the Civil War, an adventurer, a topographer, and a famous author.

Both Shepherd and Bierce grew up in the same house in Warsaw.

What?! Stick with me here.

WHO IS AMBROSE BIERCE?

Let’s back up a little. I flipped open a small book with a torn dustjacket and read, “HISTORY – an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant.” It was winter and we watched dreary fields of bent brown cornstalks as we headed south on a search for Bierce. I thought, “No wonder they called him the curmudgeon. Bierce had a wickedly sarcastic tongue.”

The book I held sported the intriguing title The Devil’s Dictionary written by one Ambrose Bierce, aka “the wickedest man in San Francisco” in 1868. The Devil’s Dictionary is a collection of “definitions” for commonly used words. It was Bierce’s most famous project. Well, famous in many places other than Warsaw, Indiana, that is. I flipped through the dictionary and read another definition:

The Devil’s Dictionary: POLITICS – The conduct
of public affairs for private advantage.

So what? Most people from Warsaw won’t care. But, Bierce is one of those guys who have faded, but who nevertheless left deep footprints.

Bierce was a world-class cynic born in 1842 whose views wouldn’t feel outdated in our current cynical world. Bierce moved to Warsaw at the age of four, living south of town with his nine siblings on a small farm. Bierce left Warsaw under strange circumstances, and his death is the strangest mystery of all. We’ll get to all of that later. First, we need to start with the thing which most shaped Bierce and all those who lived then: the Civil War.

PLACE #1 – MURFREESBORO, TENNESSEE

If you dive headlong into history, you’ll find endless material that Bierce wrote over the course of his intriguing life. After his stint as a topographical engineer in the Civil War, Lieutenant Bierce was the most famous reporter in San Francisco and wrote several short stories still taught in literature classrooms. He would write from midnight to dawn with a human skull on his desk and a lizard on his shoulder. He liked to keep a menagerie of frogs, snakes, squirrels, and birds too.

One of his stories is called, “A Resumed Identity” which describes a soldier at the end of his life returning to the site of a Civil War battle. The smells and sounds of the place throw the poor man into an episode of reliving the battle and result in the veteran’s death at the site of a monument. That monument is Hazen’s Monument, at Stones River National Military Park, marking where the battle occurred on the last day of 1862. It is the oldest Civil War monument still standing in its original location. It stands where the soldiers themselves, including Bierce most likely, built it with their own hands to honor their dead comrades.

The spot is still off the main road a bit, and out of the main parts of the battlefield tour. If you stand a moment and listen to the wind and the solitary crow, it’s easy to imagine another part of the story, describing the ghosts the veteran in the story began to see. The old man saw: “Behind were men afoot, marching in column, with dimly gleaming rifles aslant above their shoulders. They moved slowly and in silence. Another group of horsemen, another regiment of infantry, another, and another – all in unceasing motion … A battery of artillery followed, the cannoneers riding with folded arms …” Ghosts of the Civil War. If you squint, you can feel them still.

The Devil’s Dictionary: GHOST – The outward
and visible sign of an inward fear.

It was time to drive home to Warsaw and look for Bierce there.

PLACE #2 – THE OLD BIERCE HOUSE, WARSAW, INDIANA

People from Warsaw described Bierce as an angelic child with light blue eyes and golden curls. But he had a “tendency towards deviltry, truancy and other waywardnesses,” according to O’Connor’s Ambrose Bierce: A Biography.

Bierce once wrote of walking three miles north to school in Warsaw, and afterward a half mile south to swim in Goose Lake. Bierce was the tenth child in his family, and his parents were very strict. His father, however, had the best library in the county and Bierce spent a lot of time reading.

By 15, Bierce hated living in Warsaw. First, he quit school to become a printer’s devil (helper) at the Northern Indianian newspaper (the forerunner of The Times-Union). Not long after he was accused of theft from the paper, and he quit that too even though he was cleared of suspicion. In the spring of 1861, he bitterly left Warsaw for the call of the Union-blue soldier uniform.

Back to the man across the table from me in 2022. As a child, my friend Joe Shepherd moved into that same Bierce farmhouse in 1955. He had no knowledge of Bierce or his presence there until a strange coincidence revealed it. Shepherd still lives on the park-like property in a house he built himself next door. At our second meeting, Joe Shepherd sat surrounded by pieces of treasure from Spanish galleons from his dives around the world. I admired a clump of coins fused together as he handed me magazine covers showcasing his amazing finds. The group he works with has now discovered four Florida shipwrecks with an estimated worth in the millions. They are battling both France and the government to keep some of their finds. We talked treasure and biography, but also Bierce.

Joe held a thick sheaf of information that I had sent to him including Bierce’s writings, maps, and the Devil’s Dictionary. “I feel a deep companionship with Bierce,” Joe exclaimed. “I had a difficult childhood in Warsaw also. It’s amazing to think that we grew up in the same house.” Shepherd, like most of us from Warsaw, had never heard of Ambrose Bierce.

Today the shell of the Bierce house is unremarkable. It has no electricity and a few missing shingles. No one has lived there in years, and one must squint to see the ancient house underneath the modern siding. I can’t believe any large families once co-existed inside its tiny walls.

The Devil’s Dictionary: INFANCY – The period of our lives when,
according to Wordsworth, ‘Heaves lies about us.’ The world begins
lying about us pretty soon afterward.

Joe Shepherd lives in a brick house on a long sloping hill on West CR 200S in Warsaw. Next to that house is the little white house with green shutters where both he and Bierce grew up in.

A few years ago, as part of a National History Day project I was working on with several middle-school boys, we tried to figure out where Bierce’s house had stood. We found old maps marking the property and, with a little luck, found Joe. When we told him the story, Joe shook his head and said, “You’re not going to believe this!” He pulled out an old picture marked Gus Bierce.

“I used to be an auctioneer,” Shepherd told us. “One day I purchased a wooden box full of stereoscope pictures and stuck it in my closet. A few years later I was sorting through the pictures when one jumped out at me. I stared at the familiar-looking house and realized that it was the house I had grown up in. The one still sitting on my property!”

Gus (Short for Augustus – all nine of Bierce’s siblings’ names began with A) and his family were sitting in front of that little house. Gus Bierce was Ambrose’s older brother who took over the family farm. Yep – the Bierce house. And, if you look on the county land plats, you’ll see the name “Bierce Ditch” which runs through the closest field and all the way to Rozella Ford golf course. A little tiny clue to a famous Warsaw native who left for greener fields.

The Devil’s Dictionary: FAMOUS – Conspicuously miserable

PLACE #3 – The Bierce Gravestone in Oakwood Cemetery, Warsaw, Indiana.

There’s one more place a historian can find Ambrose Bierce. Sort of. He does have a gravestone in the Oakwood Cemetery. But, he isn’t actually buried there. No one knows where he’s buried as the old curmudgeon left his position for the last tour of his Civil War battlefield ghosts and ended up in Mexico where he disappeared. Or, at least that’s the story. People are still searching for his ghost. Bierce is a man full of mysteries. I’m not even sure who put that gravestone in Oakwood Cemetery.

Joe Shepherd looked thoughtful right before I left our interview that day. He had wandered out to stare across his lovely park-like yard to the old Bierce house still standing on the other side. He worried that someday Warsaw would put a freeway bypass in and the old house would have to be torn down as it stood directly in the path of progress. “It’s history,” he marveled. “Just sitting there. And, I never knew it. It’s also the future.” We shook hands and I walked down his curving driveway to my car wishing Joe Shepherd and Ambrose Bierce’s house the best of luck.  

The Devil’s Dictionary: FUTURE: That period of time in which
our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

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