The United States is a young country... Its frontier struggles... can be seen as having inspired some versions of epic, in the form of the films of DW Griffith (Birth of a Nation, 1915) and westerns....
Look it's entirely possible that Birth of a Nation could be in some senses related to epic poems like The Odyssey, but you do NOT just casually drop in a reference to this racist pos film (originally titled The Clansman) without SOME explanation.