Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum

Martin Johnson grew up in Kansas with a restless hunger for adventure, and as a young man he sailed with the writer Jack London on a South Seas voyage that set the course of his life. Back home he met Osa, a young Kansas woman who became his wife and equal partner, and together they set out to see and record the far corners of the world, an extraordinary ambition for a couple from the plains.

Over the following decades the Johnsons mounted expedition after expedition to Africa, to Borneo, and to the islands of the South Pacific, traveling into places few Westerners had reached. Osa proved as intrepid as Martin, and their partnership, both in marriage and in filmmaking, became the heart of their fame. That two people from small-town Kansas accomplished all this is a large part of what makes their story so compelling.

The Johnsons were pioneers of expedition filmmaking and photography in an age before television, when few people had ever seen moving images of distant lands and wildlife. They hauled heavy cameras into the field and captured footage of elephants, lions, and other animals, and of the peoples they met, then brought it back to enthrall audiences in theaters and lecture halls across America.

Their films and books made them celebrities and shaped how a generation of Americans imagined Africa and the South Pacific. Seen today, the work reflects the attitudes and framing of its era, the perspective of 1920s and 1930s Western explorers looking outward, and the museum presents it as both a landmark of early documentary and a document of its time.

The museum grew up in Chanute because of Osa's ties to the region, and it has become the home of a rich archive of the Johnsons' work, films, photographs, cameras, and artifacts gathered on their travels. For anyone interested in the history of exploration, documentary film, or early photography, it is a remarkable resource, far deeper than a small-town museum might suggest.

Beyond the Johnsons' own story, the museum has broadened over the years to explore the cultures and wildlife of the lands they visited, and to preserve related art and artifacts. It stands as a lasting tribute to two adventurers whose curiosity carried them from a Kansas town to the ends of the earth and back.

Chanute is a southeast-Kansas railroad town, named for a pioneering engineer, set in the greener, more wooded part of the state where prairie gives way to oak groves and creek bottoms. This was long the country of the Osage people, who lived across southeast Kansas, and whose nation continues today, now centered in Oklahoma.

The surrounding region mixes farmland, old oil-and-gas country, and rolling woodland, and Chanute makes a natural stop on a route through southeast Kansas. Spring and fall bring the most pleasant weather for exploring the town and the wider country, while summers run warm and humid and winters are generally mild for the plains.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.