His father was from Vermont and his mother, a native of Nova Scotia, Canada, came to Ohio from Boston, Massachusetts, with her family.

The young Otis received schooling until he was fourteen, when he became a printer's apprentice at the Noble County Courier in Ohio.

[1] Otis was a delegate from Kentucky to the Republican National Convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860.

At the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, he left his job as a compositor in the office of the Louisville Journal to volunteer as a private for the Union army.

[3] He gave up journalism temporarily in 1879 when he was offered the post of chief government agent or special treasury agent[4] of the Northern Seal Islands, now known as the Pribilof Islands, in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of the newly acquired territory of Alaska.

[7][8] Eleven years earlier, however the Associated Press had called him "publisher of the Los Angeles Times.

He was a member of a group of investors who bought land in the San Fernando Valley based on inside knowledge that the Los Angeles Aqueduct would soon irrigate it.

[10] Otis and his son-in-law Harry Chandler and others formed the Colorado River Land Company, which bought land in the Mexicali Valley of Baja California at the turn of the twentieth century when Mexico's President Porfirio Díaz encouraged foreign investment to develop the country.