Director Kenneth Burns has achieved renown through his cinematic recording of American history, and many of his documentaries have become popular educational tools. In “Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery,” Burns (1997) tells a story that justifies the iconic status of these two men and their journey. The film’s perspective is decidedly “Ambrosian,” a term designating the nostalgic and nationalistic mythology of discovery promoted by historian Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage (1996). The silencing of native perspectives in educational materials about American “westward expansion” is nothing new. This essay argues that despite an attempt to include native perspectives, Burns’ work’s reinscription of popular conceptions of oral and literate cultures effectively erases the lives and perspectives of the native peoples who lived in the “unknown country” through which Lewis and Clark traveled. The mythical heroes of the film’s Ambrosian history are nothing like more critical historians’ characterization of Lewis and Clark as a historical Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who, with the help of the Shoshoni, the Nez Perce, and other native peoples, stumbled—and scribbled—their way into history. In Burns’ work, Lewis’ journals and Clark’s map “conquer” the American continent, creating order out of the disorder that precedes them. Their efforts are depicted as a textual colonization of formlessness, a taming of wild and chaotic empty space that needed to be incorporated into modernity in the name of economic and intellectual progress.