American Odyssey
To historian Craig Fehrman the 8,000-mile expedition (1804-06) indelibly associated with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark is nothing less than "our national Odyssey." To this TCM junkie their epic crossing of the continent suggests a road picture with more perils than Pauline and more plot twists than anything starring Hope and Crosby. Fehrman spent five years crafting this frontier Rashomon (my last movie analogy—promise) in which the journey unfolds through multiple viewpoints distilled from 30 archives and a hundred Native and other oral histories. What in less skillful hands might have been a mere travelogue becomes a cross-cultural, stunningly rendered rethink of Discoverers and Discovered.
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