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