“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
by Ambrose Bierce
THE LITERARY WORK
A short story set in Alabama during the American Civil War, around 1863; published in 1891.
SYNOPSIS
A Confederate civilian being hung by Union soldiers vividly imagines making an escape.
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written
In September 1861, just a few months after the Civil War broke out, nineteen-year-old Ambrose Bierce joined the Union army in Indiana. By the time the war ended in 1865, he had fought in numerous major battles, worked as a military mapmaker, and been severely wounded in the head. He had also stored up enough memories to provide material for nineteen short stories about the war. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is the most famous of these stories. Despite its unconventional style, this story provided one of the first realistic portrayals of the horrors of the war.
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place
Railroads in the Civil War
Peyton Farquhar, the main character in Bierce’s short story, is slated to be hung not for murder, rape, or some other violent crime, but for attempting to destroy a railroad bridge. A civilian, Farquhar hoped to protect Confederate soldiers from attack by tampering with the railroad line. The idea of using railroads to fight a war may seem strange today, but at the time of the American Civil War, tracks and locomotives played an extremely important role in military maneuvers. Used to transport troops, supplies, and food, railroads were usually the most efficient route from one site to another. Many famous battles were won or lost because of the use or destruction of railroads.
In the spring of 1864, for example, Union general William T. Sherman tried to cut off supplies to the Confederate army. He ordered one of his generals to cut the rail line that connected Decatur, Alabama, to Atlanta, Georgia, which was a Confederate stronghold. Union soldiers burned the wooden railroad ties until they were hot enough to allow the iron rails above them to be bent. With thirty miles of track destroyed in this way, rail contact with Atlanta was eliminated. Atlanta Confederates suffered greatly from lack of supplies as a result. By September, the weakened city had been captured by the Union, and shortly after this the war ended. Union destruction of southern rail lines like the Decatur-Atlanta route was partly responsible for the North’s victory.
Civil War spies
Several key battles of the Civil War hinged on the activities of individuals who did not appear on the battlefield. Many of the war’s great victories were won in part because of the information gathered in enemy camps by spies. In Bierce’s story, a soldier disguised in Confederate uniform is actually a Union spy.
This subterfuge was used by both sides in the war; soldiers would dress in the uniform of the other side and slip into enemy territory, reporting battle plans and strategic locations when they returned to the home camp. Others would impersonate civilians and cross enemy lines to observe the nature and deployment of enemy military equipment. Many spies were not soldiers at all.
Peyton Farquhar’s readiness to burn a Union bridge was typical of the military fervor felt by some civilians. One young woman, Belle Boyd— who could observe the movements of Union officers from her home in West Virginia—risked her life time and again to carry messages to Confederate officers about Union plans. Although her fate was less tragic than the one suffered by Peyton Farquhar, she spent more than a few days in prison and sometimes found herself crossing battlefields in the midst of fierce fighting. She was only one of a devoted body of spies—both soldiers and civilians—who affected the course of the Civil War.
A civilian planter in the midst of war
In the spring of 1862, the South’s Confederate government passed a law requiring all white men aged eighteen to thirty-five to serve for three years in the military. Although this law had a great impact on the lives of most Southerners, those who owned plantations, like Peyton Farquhar, had two ways to escape it. Wealthy men had the option of hiring substitutes (new immigrants or people too young or old to be directly affected by the law) to serve in their stead. In addition, an amendment passed the following September stipulated that planters who owned at least twenty slaves were automatically exempt from service. Although this amendment was added to protect the farming economy of the South, it was perceived as unfair and caused a rift between rich planters and poorer Confederates. Soon soldiers began to believe that they were involved in “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” (Rogers et al., p. 206).
Peyton Farquhar, whom Bierce describes as a civilian of about thirty-five, may have avoided military service for a few different reasons. He probably owned enough slaves to qualify for the planter exemption (since he was well-to-do), and if he did not, he may have been exempt anyway because of his age. For Farquhar, however, these exemptions were probably not his only reasons for remaining a civilian. As the story points out, part of him wanted to fight for the South. In fact, he “chafed under the inglorious restraint” of everyday life, longing for “the larger life of the soldier” (Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” p. 12). Perhaps Farquhar thought he should stay home to protect his farm and family, then decided to justify this decision (and quench his own thirst for military involvement) by acting as a Confederate assistant on the side. In any case, by the summer of 1862, the northern Alabama city of Huntsville had been captured by the Union army, so that even the Confederate civilians in this area lived in danger. Most residents of northern Alabama moved south to avoid the Union troops, but Peyton Farquhar stayed where he was.
Brutal battles
Ambrose Bierce fought for the Union, or the North, in the Civil War. One of the first battles in which the young Ambrose Bierce fought was at Shiloh, near the Mississippi/Tennessee border, in April 1862. There the twenty-year-old Bierce became one of 100,000 soldiers who took part in what was then the bloodiest battle ever fought in North America; almost one-fourth of the participants were killed. Although Bierce survived, and his side was victorious, this battle must have had a powerful effect on him. In an essay entitled “What I Saw at Shiloh,” he describes a scene from the battlefield:
There were men enough; all dead, apparently, except one, who lay near where I had halted my platoon to await the slower movement of the line—a Federal sergeant, variously hurt, who had been a fine giant in his time. He lay face upward, taking in his breath in convulsive, rattling snorts, and blowing it out in sputters of froth which crawled creamily down his cheeks, piling itself alongside his neck and ears. A bullet had clipped a groove in his skull, above the temple; from this the brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings
(Bierce in Woodruff, p. 63)
Bierce was not the only one to witness such a scene or to be affected by it. At Shiloh and on other battlefields, soldiers faced horrors they had never imagined before. One soldier from Iowa, unable to describe the details of the battle he had fought, wrote that the best way to experience his feelings without enduring the battle was to “call to mind all the horrible scenes of which you ever saw or heard, then put them all together and you can form some faint conception of the scene I witnessed” (Mitchell, p. 77). Many soldiers became paralyzed with fear at the first sight of battle. Others felt exhilarated by their brushes with death. In any case, most of them had to face what might have been the most horrific truth of war— that they were not just victims of the enemy’s guns, but killers themselves.
The Short Story in Focus
The plot
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is the story of the hanging of a Confederate civilian, Peyton Farquhar, as punishment for his efforts to sabotage a Union bridge. The story is divided into three sections. The first describes the scene of the hanging, the second provides background to explain how Farquhar came to such a point, and the third details his imagined escape.
The first section of the story is told mostly in the detached language of an objective observer. A man’s hands are tied behind him and a noose encircles his neck. He stands on a railroad bridge, where he is flanked by Union soldiers quietly preparing to put him to death. The man makes no motion of protest, but remains quiet during the preparations. He is described as a civilian gentleman of thirty-five, a Confederate planter. As the time of his hanging approaches, he begins to consider a way to escape; but in the next moment, the plank he has been standing on is removed.
Before more details of the hanging can be described, the story abruptly shifts to the next section, a flashback into Farquhar’s recent life. An ardent supporter of the Confederacy, he is always eager to hear news of the war. When a soldier stops by his plantation one evening, Farquhar presses him for details from the battlefront. This soldier, a Union spy disguised as a Confederate soldier, tells Farquhar about a nearby railroad bridge that is strategically important for the Union. Any civilian caught interfering with it, he says, will be hanged. At Farquhar’s urging, however, he explains that one side of the creek that runs under it is not very well guarded, and that the bridge could easily be destroyed by fire.
Instead of telling the story of Farquhar’s attempt to burn the bridge, the narrative returns to the scene of the hanging. When the plank that has supported his weight is removed, Farquhar falls straight through the railroad ties of the bridge (the same bridge he had attempted to destroy) and is, Bierce writes, “as one already dead” (“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” p. 13). He is not dead, however; he awakens after losing consciousness, aware of agonizing pains throughout his body. He falls into the rushing creek below, for the rope that his captors sought to hang him with has broken. After a long struggle, he frees his hands from the cord that tied them and is able to swim to the surface for air. Within moments, the soldiers standing on the bridge begin firing at him, but he manages to dodge their bullets and swim to shore. The rest of his escape takes him through a thick forest to a road he follows all the way to his home. He passes through the gate and sees his beautiful wife waiting for him in front of the house. Just as he reaches to touch her, he feels a blow to his neck and all goes dark. He is dead. Though his mind led him home, his body, with a broken neck, has not escaped from the noose. It hangs from the Owl Creek Bridge.
Glorified war vs. reality
The American Civil War was the subject of great numbers of songs, novels, and stories long before “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” was written. Almost all of these works, however, painted a picture of the war as a glorious period in American history, a time when courageous soldiers fought for honorable ideals. The horrors of battle were ignored or glossed over so the romantic vision of war could be portrayed. One typical Civil War writer, John Esten Cooke, describes his branch of the Confederate army in the 1868 novel Mohun:
Army of Northern Virginia!—old soldiers of Lee, who fought beside your captain until your frames were wasted… —you are greater to me in your wretchedness, more splendid in your rags, than the Old Guard of Napoleon, or the three hundred of Thermopylae! Neither famine, nor nakedness, nor suffering, could break your spirit. You were tattered and half-starved; your forms were war-worn; but you still had faith in Lee, and the great cause which you bore aloft on the points of your bayonets.
(Cooke, p. 241)
In the second section of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Peyton Farquhar’s devotion to the “great cause” of the Confederates is described. Although he is not a member of the military, Farquhar feels that “no service [is] too humble for him to perform in aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake” since he is “at heart a soldier” (“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” p. 12). His eagerness to burn down Owl Creek Bridge betrays his hunger for military action and the opportunity for distinction that comes with it. Farquhar’s initial vision of the war, then, is very much in keeping with the sentiments toward the conflict portrayed by Cooke.
Soon, however, this vision abruptly changes. Farquhar’s transformation from an idealistic military dreamer to a man desperate to escape the horror of death is typical of the transformation most Civil War soldiers went through after their first battle. One Union soldier, after being promoted early in the war to a position that did not require much fighting, complained to his wife in a letter that safety “is not what I came for[;] I came to fight & kill and come back[.]” After a year and a half, he wrote his wife again: “it makes me laugh to see the papers talk about this regiment and that[,] and that the men are eager for a chance to get at the enemy all in your eyes, there is none that wants to fight or will if they can keep clear of it” (Mitchell, p. 76).
Most Civil War soldiers, however noble their reasons for fighting, wanted desperately to stay alive. This desire often led them to less-than-noble acts, like deserting their posts to return home. Farquhar’s imagined escape alludes to such realistic reactions instead of romantic ones. Farquhar allows his desperation to take control of his sensations; his desire to live is so powerful that his mind concocts an illusion of escape that feels real. Early literary accounts of the war such as those provided by Cooke may not have dwelled on such desperate feelings, but Bierce’s story may relate a more honest version of the way most real Civil War soldiers died—feeling fear and desperation, not honor and courage, in their hearts.
Sources
Like many of Bierce’s war stories, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is based largely on the writer’s own experiences as a Civil War soldier. In fact, the battle at Shiloh at which Bierce was present was fought next to a Tennessee waterway known as “Owl Creek.” Why Bierce shifted Owl Creek to Alabama in his story is unknown, although some evidence suggests that it might have been because of another experience he had during the war. In his Bits of Autobiography, Bierce recounts an adventure he had while stationed in Alabama. Bored with life at the camp where they were confined for a few days, Bierce and some fellow soldiers decided to explore the nearby Confederate territory. Soon Bierce found himself separated from his friends and imprisoned by Confederate soldiers. In a daring escape, however, Bierce made his way back to the Union camp. A comparison of Bierce’s autobiographical escape and Farquhar’s fictional one shows their similarities:
Bits of Autobiography
I now took my course by the north star (which I can never sufficiently bless), avoiding all roads and open places about houses, laboriously boring my way through forests, driving myself like a wedge into brush and bramble, swimming every stream I came to (some of them more than once, probably), and pulling myself out of the water by boughs and briars—whatever could be grasped.
(Bierce, The Collected Works, pp. 312-13)
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
All that day he traveled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not even a woodman’s road.... By nightfall he was fatigued, footsore, famishing. The thought of his wife and children urged him on. At last he found a road which led him in what he knew to be the right direction. It was as wide and straight as a city street, yet it seemed untraveled. No fields bordered it, no dwelling anywhere. (“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” p. 17)
Both Bierce and Farquhar journey through the streams and forests of Alabama while military men pursue them. Both eventually reach “home”—for Bierce, his Union camp; for Farquhar, his plantation. But Farquhar’s safe return is just an illusion, while Bierce’s return (according to his autobiography) is real.
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written
Postwar cynicism
In the decades after the Civil War, the United States entered into a prosperous era. Cities grew, industries flourished, and many people became very wealthy. San Francisco, the city in which Bierce settled after the war, was home to a number of “forty-niners,” prospectors who had struck it rich in the gold rush of 1848-1849, and railroad executives, whose monopoly on California transportation made them among the wealthiest men in the country. Not everyone in San Francisco was a member of this new wealthy class, however. After a depression that began in 1873, jobs were extremely hard to find. The very rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer. Soon working people began to unleash their frustration on one another.
Bierce, a keen observer of the social injustices in San Francisco, wrote newspaper columns that were harshly critical of hypocritical businessmen and political figures, but these bitter pieces did little to brighten the prospects for most of San Francisco’s residents. The idealism that had flourished in the East during the Civil War—the support for the values of the region, whether North or South—was almost nonexistent in postwar California. Bierce, though a valiant Union veteran, became the spokesperson for cynicism in the West. He, as well as many of his fellow citizens, had lost faith in humanity and in the prospects for a better life. This pessimistic view persisted not only in his columns but also in the dark world of stories such as “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”
Realism, Romanticism, and reader response
In the 1880s, a few years before Bierce began writing his war stories, American writers started experimenting with a new way of portraying life in their fiction. This new movement, called realism, stressed the importance of characters who resemble real people, not idealized figments of a writer’s imagination. For many real-
TWO TRAGEDIES
Bierce’s disillusionment with society may have had its roots in his Civil War experiences or in events in his life during his stay in San Francisco. Shortly before writing “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” his life was rocked by two personal tragedies that must have added to his pessimism. The first had been long in coming. His troubled marriage (to the daughter of a forty-niner) ended in 1887 when Bierce found a love letter written to his wife by a wealthy bachelor. Despite his wife’s probable innocence in the matter (and his own previous love affairs), Bierce’s ego was wounded, and he left his wife forever. “I don’t take part in competitions—even in love,” he explained to a friend (Bierce in Saunders, p. 51). Far more shocking an event was the death of Bierce’s son, Day, at the age of sixteen. Enraged at the marriage of his girlfriend to a rival, Day went on a shooting rampage in 1889 that ended with his own suicide. Apparently proud of his son’s tragic attempt to protect his honor, Bierce remarked on seeing his son’s body: “You are a noble son, Day. You did just right” (Bierce in Saunders, p. 56).
ists, this meant recreating the lives of common men and women, including their everyday speech and their moral weaknesses. Although Bierce is known for creating a more realistic picture of the horrors of war than any Civil War writer before him, he detested realism as a movement. Bierce commented on the issue in his written work:
We human insects care for nothing but ourselves, and think that is best which most closely touches such emotions and sentiments as grow out of our relations, the one with another. I don’t share this preference and a few others do not, believing that there are things more interesting than men and women.
(Bierce in Grattan, p. 115)
Rather than recreating life as everyone (and everything) else perceived it, Bierce wanted to explore what life could be. Consequently, his stories usually focus on extraordinary things happening in the midst of “real” life. Rejecting realism, Bierce thought of himself as a “Romantic” writer, an adherent to an older tradition of American writing that stressed the importance of imagination over all else.
Partly because of Bierce’s refusal to follow the trend of the times, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and his other stories were not very popular at the time they were written. Ironically, however, their vivid, honest descriptions of war and the believable sensations of their characters led later literary critics to point to Bierce as one of the first American realists.
For More Information
Bierce, Ambrose. The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce. Vol. 1. New York: Neale, 1909.
Bierce, Ambrose. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” In The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce. New York: Citadel, 1946.
Cooke, John Esten. Mohun or, The Last Days of Lee and His Paladins. Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg, 1968.
Grattan, C. Hartley. Bitter Bierce: A Mystery of American Letters. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929.
Mitchell, Reid. Civil War Soldiers. New York: Simon &r Shuster, 1988.
Rogers, William Warren, Robert David Ward, Leah Rawls Atkins, and Wayne Flynt. Alabama: The History of a Deep South State. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994.
Saunders, Richard. Ambrose Bierce: The Making of a Misanthrope. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1985.
Woodruff, Stuart C. The Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, a Study in Polarity. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964.