Filmmaker Statement

Nearly all of my ancestors in early America are now anonymous: enslaved people of African descent, indentured people of European descent, and a remainder who escaped to carve out some semblance of a free life on the fringes of a new country. One famous outlier - Meriwether Lewis, of the eponymous Lewis & Clark - has always stuck out. He was a man who embodied many of the contradictions of his time, and who ultimately could not bear to live with those contradictions. Lewis was gay man: one who lived a life that was about as 'out' as was possible in his time and place, but who still had to endure the tortured charade of living in what we would now consider the closet. I was inspired to make this film by the discovery of the partner who accompanied Lewis in his final years: John Pernia, a free Creole man. Documentation of Pernia's life is limited to the messy aftermath of Meriwether Lewis's death, but what little we do know is extraordinary. Pernia's story spans a continent: likely born and raised in New Orleans, he went on to to work for Thomas Jefferson in the White House, which is where he met Meriwether Lewis, the man with whom he would spend the few remaining years of his life. Pernia and Lewis's tumultuous relationship at the bloody dawn of the American West has all the hallmarks of a tragic romance. I wanted to embrace that tragedy, but with the benefit of hindsight - from a future in which both of these men might have thrived, and might have spent decades more together. Combining documents from the Lewis and Clark expedition with the cinema of the early 20th century - including some of the first Westerns committed to film - I have attempted to tell the story of two men who were there at the start. Men who do not fit the cowboy archetype, but who lived that reality to a degree of depth and substance that John Wayne might struggle even to imagine.