1883-1966

Anthropologist

 Henry Otley Beyer, the Henry he never spelled out in his signatures, was born in Edgewood, Iowa, on July 13, 1883. It appears that he had an uncle with exactly the same name who managed a store and operated a creamery and as the younger Henry was collecting stamps he found his mail was going to his uncle’s box so he started to abbreviate his name. His father, J. David Beyer, was a soldier in the U.S. military service for 21 years; during the Civil War he joined the 27^th Iowa Volunteers (Infantry) and was wounded twice in action. J. David Beyer’s paternal ancestor came from Denmark as an immigrant from Bavaria, East Germany, and he carried the Germanic family name Beyer; this ancestor later crossed the Atlantic arriving in Philadelphia in 1784, one of his descendants becoming one of the three pioneers of northeastern Iowa sometime in 1829.

H. Otley Beyer was the first of three children of J. David Beyer, a former soldier of the U.S. army, with his second wife, Katherine Fleck, who as a simple housewife and native of Sinking Valley, Pennsylvania. Returning home from the Civil War his father devoted himself to his homestead when he raised an orchard of 30 arcres. Most of his boyhood years were spent pleasantly on the farm while getting his elementary schooling locally. This farm was not far away from two American Indian groups, one of which was the fox, and the young Henry was introduced quite early to American Indian life.

After finishing at the Edgewood High School in 1900, he went with a friend to the south in Alabama and Mississippi, where he worked in a small town newspaper writing features sometimes. The following year he was enrolled at Corneal College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. He then moved to Iowa State College and later to the University of Denver where he obtained his A.B. in 1904 and his 1905, writing a thesis on the chemistry of rare metals. During two summers before graduation he worked for the U.S. Geological Survey, part of which training carried him to Colorado bordering other states and getting introduced to archaeology by stumbling into dwelling cliff sites.

Sometime in June-July 1904 he spent a couple of weeks at St. Louis, Missouri, viewing the big exposition going on there. This was in fact the Louisiana Purchase Exposition celebrating the 100^th anniversary of the purchase of Louisiana territory. The planners wanted to make it a real big event, a world exposition that would surpass anything of its kind held previously. H. Otley Beyer visited the exposition grounds and what attracted his attention most were the Philippine exhibits which featured a live show of human beings. He saw a number of the so called wild peoples of the Philippines in their transplanted habitats, for aside from native peoples from several parts of the country – Negritos, Igorots, Visayans, Moros – native houses were constructed on a 50-acre land simulating specific local communities and environments. Bamboo, nipa, thatch and rattan were shipped to St. Louis to make the villages look realistic, a lake was dug to capture the Lake Lanao life complete with houses on stilts over the water and vinta to spare. There was a Maranao orchestra playing on native musical instruments that attracted thousands of Americans, among them Frances Densmore, later to become the outstanding ethnomusicologist of her age. Although this lady did not come to the Philippines as H. Otley Beyer did, she was the first American to write on Filipino music and scale. His interest aroused, H. Otley Beyer talked to Dr. Albert Ernest Jenks, official in-charge of the exhibits and the chief of the Philippine Ethnological Survey. He received some encouragement, and by the Fall of 1904 he had decided to join Philippine colonial service.

It was probably the same pioneering spirit that ran in his ancestors’s veins that prompted the young H. Otley Beyer to cross another ocean and join the American administration in the Philippines. On august 16, 1905, he landed in Manila only to find that his position had been abolished by the Reorganization Act of 1905, the Ethnological which was under the Department of Public Instruction. As this department was under the administration of Dr. David P. Barrows, a Ph. D. graduate in anthropology, H. Otley Beyer accepted the alternative of an assignment in Mountain Province. After making his purchases and preparations in four days, he took the train to Pangasinan, which at this time was being ravaged by the dreadful cholera. He did not cower from the ghastly scenes he saw along the way for he had started on a medical career and had taken enough precautions. It was also in Pangasinan where a tropical storm overtook him, his first experience in the Islands.

With the help of cargadores, he reached his destination, Banawe. After looking around for a few days, he decided than and three to make the Philippines his home, for what he saw in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition was now more than a reality. He had started to love the mountain landscape and rice terraces, the villages and the people in them about whom he had seen displaced in St. Louis.

Beyer served as a supervising teacher with headquarters at Banawe, advantage point from while he sallied forth into the various villages and regions. But as he was not trained for anthropological work, sometime in April 1908, he decided to leave for the U.S.A. to obtain formal training and education in the study of man and his culture. He sailed in May via the Asian ports to the Middle East, made trips to the pyramids of Egypt and visited museums in Europe along the way. He had saved enough and tugged along a native Ifugao to take along to Harvard where he took courses in anthropology, among them being those under Dr. Roland Dixon and Frederick Ward Putnam, the builder of American museums, under whom he wrote a number of papers on Ifugao culture and ecology.

By January 1910 Beyer was back in Banawe and although he did not get any advanced degree from Harvard, he was now a much more enlightened person, having now the training to do anthropological work in Mountain Province. Something else happened in this year. He noticed that one of the village girls had grown up sine he left not more than a couple of years ago; she was in fact the daughter of the collage chief of Amganad. Her name was Lingnayu. Beyer’s earlier picture of her was with bare bosoms, the breasts hardly showing as yet, now she was fully a maiden. Beyer must have contracted marriage following Ifugao customs sometime in the latter part of 1910. He spent two bagful of silver coins to distribute to all the relatives of his wife. They had a couple of children, but the first one died in infancy.

It is not known how much of Ifugao culture Beyer learned by getting married to a native woman. H. Otley Beyer during his lifetime was very reticent about his married life. This was a period in the history of anthropology when anthropologists were still shy about arising on the sex life of native peoples and Beyer belonged to that age. There is nothing either from his notes that showed his interest along this line. His collecting work and notes were still largely in manuscript form yellowed by age.

Aside from these papers, from 1910 to 1914 he was engaged in collecting the literature on the Ifugao people; he expanded his field work among the other mountain peoples such as the Bontok, Kalinga, and others. He also started copying and translating a few and annotating them, or asked others to make the translation. For instance, he translated one of Fr. Juan Villaverde’s works and entitled it The Religious Beliefs of the Kiangan Ifugaos, doing it together with John M. Garvan and Emerson B. Christie. As his collecting work and field notes on the peoples of Mountain Province were expanding, it dawned upon him t broaden this into something monumental – the collecting of everything written, published or unpublished, of the history and culture of the Filipino people. This idea dawned upon him in fact in 1917 when the Philippine Ethnographic Series was born.