Osa Leighty was singing at the theater in Chanute when Martin Johnson came through showing pictures from his voyage on Jack London's Snark. They married in Independence in 1910 and spent the rest of their lives on the road, paid by what they could sell: by the museum's count 20 books, nine feature films, dozens of shorts and more than 15,000 photographs. In 1932 they learned to fly at Chanute's airport, then flew two Sikorsky amphibians the length of Africa and filmed Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya from the air. Martin died after an airliner crash in California in January 1937. Osa's I Married Adventure was the best-selling nonfiction book of 1940.
The films were made for theaters that wanted spectacle, and the titles show it: Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Seas in 1918, Headhunters of the South Seas in 1922. Their first trip to the Big Nambas of Malekula, in the New Hebrides, ended with a British gunboat, and the footage became a feature. The camera also kept Kenya's wildlife, the Mbuti of the Ituri Forest and Borneo in the years before the Second World War.
The museum opened in 1961 with films, photographs and papers given by Osa's mother, Belle Leighty. In 1974 Dr. Pascal James Imperato added about 100 West African masks and household objects, the beginning of a gallery representing more than thirty peoples. The museum keeps sister ties with the Musée de Manega in Burkina Faso and the Sabah Museum in Malaysian Borneo, and shows Johnson films in its 30-seat theater.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour