Pit-a-pit was born to the Bontoc, who reside near the Chico River basin in the mountainous region of the Cordillera, during the Spanish colonial era.

In the late 1890s, when the Philippines was ceded by Spain to the United States, Protestantism started to take roots in northern Luzon highlands with the arrival American missionaries.

[1] He was raised under the tutelage of Walter Clayton Clapp, an Episcopalian priest who volunteered to be a missionary to the Philippines.

[2] Clapp described Pit-a-pit was “a singularly attractive and sprightly little fellow, quite innocent of clothing except a loin-cloth and a little soklong, or cap, woven of line rattan fibers, ornamented with dog-teeth and horse hair plumes, on the back of his long, flowing black hair.”[3] He was later adopted by the priest and gave him the name Hilary Clapp.

[4] He received his early education in the Bontoc missions and school in Baguio, which was becoming the new regional centre of the American colonial outpost in northern Luzon.

"[8]When the Second World War broke, Dr. Clapp was offered the governorship under the civilian government reorganized by the Japanese Imperial Army.

As governor, Clapp worked secretly with the guerilla groups and American missionaries in hiding in order to protect his people.

[10] Clapp is the subject of several works of art including a 1972 acrylic painting by National Artist Benedicto Cabrera titled Pit-a-pit's Metamorphosis.

Dean Worcester, American zoologist turned Secretary of the Interior in the Philippines, produced this sequence of portraits to generate the fantasy of radical transformation from a “savage” to "civilized."

Posthumously, Telephone Time, an American TV drama series, featured a biographical profile of him in a June 1957 episode.