Ambrose Bierce, an influential American journalist of the late nineteenth century, was born in Meigs County in 1842 and reared in Kosciusko County, Indiana. He fought in the Union Army during the Civil War, a formative experience reflected in his short stories “Chickamauga” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” After the war he moved to San Francisco, where he began his career as a writer and newspaper columnist. His cynical wit and elaborate puns reached a wide audience during the last quarter of the nineteenth century through papers including William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. His best-known book, The Devil’s Dictionary, published in 1911, is a lexicon of humorous definitions first printed in his newspaper columns. In December 1913 or January 1914, he vanished while traveling in rebellion-torn Mexico.