Shooting Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant - portrayed by Dr. Curt Fields

https://generalgrantbyhimself.com/

How this project started... was kind of strange.

So, how this project started was kind of strange. I had been working with a few artists that were working on a fundraising project for the Stars and Stripes Museum in Bloomfield, Missouri. And that had developed some great connections. I had done a few projects, and I had been on-site at the Bloomfield Museum several times doing a documentary on these two artists that are working on a project called Paint 4 Cause.

Well, one day I got a phone call, and it was about the director. The director said, "Hey, I've got a project going on. Would you be available to do it? It's coming up relatively soon." And I was like, "OK, sure".

So I didn't really know much about this project. In fact, I just knew it was going to be some type of reenactment.

So we get closer to the day, and I found out that I was going to be doing a reenactment with Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of Belmont. This was his first location, his first battle, which he inevitably lost, but he is quoted by saying that that was the battle when his men became soldiers, and it was a pivotal battle in how Grant moved forward, which I thought was pretty fascinating. Grant being our 18th president, and being that I am from Cape Girardeau, and Missouri, there is a lot of connections with Ulysses S. Grant.

The location is straight up in the middle of nowhere. Just fields and backroad levee's.

The approximate location was east of East Prairie, MO.

Here is what Grant had to say when we were done.

So this was pretty fascinating. I arrived at a hotel at our designated meeting place, and I wasn't entirely sure who I was meeting. I would say that I kind of knew right away who Ulysses S. Grant was, because he was all dressed up in his uniform. I go over to him and I introduce myself, and we kind of give each other looks, and so Dr. Fields had started asking me some questions. He said, how tall are you? And I said, six four.

We both had a realization that that was the same height as Abraham Lincoln (6ft 4in), which also had connections during this time period. So that was a pretty neat little serendipitous moment, but as we were moving towards the production, I realized that the destination was literally quite out in the middle of nowhere.

A little about Dr. Fields.

Dr. Fields researches and reads extensively about General Grant in order to deliver an accurate persona of the General.???His presentations are in first person, quoting from General Grant’s Memoirs; articles and letters the General wrote, statements he made in interviews or wrote himself, and first-person accounts of people who knew the General or were with him and witnessed him during events.? He is the same height and body style as General Grant and, therefore, presents a?convincing, true-to-life image of the man as he really looked.

Here is the end result.

The guide that we had gone with knew where this location was and as we made it to the were a few markers that designated the area of where the Battle of Belmont was at. But we quite literally were driving on levees and had quite a lot of different roads to go on to be able to get to our location.

Once we got there we precariously walked down the embankment to where is towards the riverfront area now in this area there's actually a drainage basin so a quick story the Little River drainage district reshaped a lot of the land in the southeast Missouri area and so this was an area that was affected by that however the guide mentioned that they had actually been able to recover some various items from this battle which I thought was pretty amazing but anyway you'll get to see a little bit of these still frames and it was quite an experience to be a part of.