Touring
Bearss is a consummate tour guide, bringing history alive to visitors of all knowledge levels, revealing encyclopedic stores of memory and enormous personal energy, but always with rich and colorful anecdotes. A Washington Post reporter described his style as "Homeric monologues." The Wall Street Journal wrote that he evokes "almost hallucinatory sensations." Historian Dennis Frye said a "battlefield with Ed Bearss transcendental experience." Admirers have suggested that, if the United States ever recognizes Living National Treasures, as Japan and Australia do, Bearss should be an immediate honoree.
Bearss started interpretative touring as part of his official duties in Vicksburg, leading eight one-hour tours a day. Although he was no longer required to do so after 1958, he kept it up as an avocation on weekends. He attracted ROTC classes, active-duty military officers and VIPs, and other historians. Beginning in 1961, he began annual tours for the prestigious Chicago Civil War Roundtable. One of his greatest challenges was his annual tours of Vicksburg for the Louisiana School for the Blind and Deaf. He is a lifetime honorary member of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable, to which he has spoken many times, beginning in 1962 and as recently as 2004.
Currently, Bearss, in his eighties, continues to lead numerous tours—traveling as many as 200 days per year—around the United States, the Pacific, and Europe. He routinely outpaces his much younger guests in charging over rough terrain, recreating the color of famous infantry and cavalry attacks.
Bearss lives in Arlington County, Virginia.
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