The sisters Elizabeth and Sarah Metcalf went to the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis as ordinary fairgoers. They encountered the exhibit of living Bagobo people at the Philippine Reservation, were impressed by their music and their splendid dress, and traveled to Mindanao a year later to live and work there. This article traces their travels, occupation, and collecting activities, especially their relationships with the Bagobo of Santa Cruz, the kind of information that they were interested in, and the actual objects that they collected and on which they focused their energies. Their relationships in the field with another pioneering female, Laura Watson Benedict, whose extended fieldwork among the Bagobo briefly overlapped with the Metcalfs, are also discussed. Finally, some general observations concerning the nature of fieldwork for women anthropologists in the 1900s compared with the 1990s are presented.