Chanute

We came to Chanute knowing almost nothing about it, and left slightly obsessed with Martin and Osa Johnson, a husband-and-wife team from this small southeastern Kansas town who, starting in the 1910s, traveled to the South Pacific and East Africa to film some of the earliest wildlife and ethnographic documentaries ever made. The Safari Museum here holds their cameras, film reels, and artifacts collected across decades of expeditions, and Lia — who studies documentary film — spent nearly three hours reading every placard while I quietly gave up trying to hurry her along.

The Safari Museum

What struck us most was how genuinely adventurous and, at the time, radical their work was — a small-town Kansas couple chartering planes and boats into places most Americans of that era had never even seen photographs of, bringing back footage of lions, elephants, and Pacific island communities that shaped how a whole generation of Americans imagined the wider world. The museum doesn’t shy away from the era’s complicated colonial framing either, which gave the visit more texture than a simple hero-worship exhibit would have.

The Santa Fe Depot and downtown

Chanute grew up as a railroad junction, and the restored 1907 Santa Fe Depot downtown, now housing a small museum of its own, still gives a sense of how central the trains once were to the town’s identity — a busy stop on the line between Kansas City and Tulsa. We wandered the compact downtown afterward, brick storefronts mostly intact, and had a slow coffee at a shop near the depot, watching a freight train roll through on tracks that are still very much in use.

Getting There

Chanute is about two hours south of Kansas City and its international airport (MCI) via US-169, and roughly 90 minutes northeast of Wichita. A car is essential — there’s no public transit connecting the town — but it makes a solid stop if you’re driving the corridor between Kansas City and Tulsa.