By: Lamont Lindstrom, Kendall Professor of Anthropology
Osa Leighty met future husband Martin Johnson in 1909 when she was in high school in Chanute, Kansas. Johnson hired her to perform dubious hula dances in one of the Snark Theaters he had opened around southeast Kansas. In 1907-08, Johnson had crewed on Jack London’s yacht Snark that sailed from Oakland, California, and ended in the Solomon Islands when London pulled the plug on his circumnavigational dreams. Johnson returned to Kansas to lecture and to project still and motion pictures collected during the voyage. He and Osa eloped in 1910 when she was 16. A banner on Independence’s Snark Theater read “Been Around the World and Found a Girl to Marry him at Last.”

In the 1910s, Osa and Martin left Kansas to lecture on several Vaudeville theater circuits. They found financial backing to return to the South Pacific in 1917 with a plan to film cannibals and headhunters. Although these savage stereotypes misrepresented Pacific reality, they proved popular among American audiences. The Johnsons’ first silent film, Cannibals of the South Seas, was profitable enough to fund a second expedition to Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides (Vanuatu today) in 1919, and a sequel silent film entitled Head Hunters of the South Seas.
The Johnsons were the first to make motion pictures in the New Hebrides. Both Martin and Osa worked the cameras although Martin frequently staged Osa in front of the camera interacting with local people and animals. From the South Pacific, the Johnsons moved on to film in Borneo and then Africa, to which they returned several times, focusing on animal photography. Their films Trailing Wild African Animals (1923), Simba (1928), Congorilla (1932) and Baboona (1935), among others, introduced American audiences to nature photography.
Although Osa (“Mrs. Johnson”) played Martin’s sidekick, she was a partner in the couple’s photographic and commercial endeavors. She cultivated a persona as a 1920s “modern girl,” adventuring around the world. She created various products including children’s books, “Osa’s Jungle Pets” stuffed animals, jewelry and the Osafari clothing line. She also featured as a product spokesperson; my favorite of these are her ads for Blatz Beer, Milwaukee’s Finest. Osa also appeared on a 1930s Wheaties cereal box as a “Champion of Sports.”

Martin died in a 1937 air crash in Burbank, California, and Osa continued on her own. During the Pacific War, she recycled the 1917 and 1919 work into books and a film (I Married Adventure) to familiarize Americans with the war zone, and she planned a solo return to Africa. In 1950, she was appointed honorary chair of the National Wildlife Federation. In 1953, hosted Osa Johnson’s Big Game Hunt, television’s first wildlife series that recycled Johnson photography. Osa died, in New York City, in 1953.
For more about Osa, see P. Ahrens, L. Lindstrom and F. Paisley’s Across the World with the Johnsons: Visual Culture and American Empire in the Twentieth Century (Ashgate, 2013).
Lamont Lindstrom is an honorary trustee of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum. Located in Chanute, Kansas, the museum is a two-hour drive north from Tulsa. The Johnsons are buried nearby in Chanute’s cemetery.
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