Francis H. Gambell was born in Iowa in 1870. He grew up on his parents' farm and eventually attended Parsons College in Iowa. He received a medical degree there in 1898 and set up practice in Minnesota. A few months later, bored with his practice, he accepted a government position in Alaska, where the government was trying to introduce reindeer as sources of food and transportation for the Eskimos. Gambell was sent to the Eaton Reindeer Station, north of Yukon River, as the physician for government employees stationed there. He spent three years in Alaska and was appointed supervisor of the government reindeer stations. He returned to Minnesota and his private practice in 1901. When civil war broke out in Russia in 1919, following the Russian Revolution, Gambell traveled with the Red Cross to Siberia, where he worked on the only train transporting wounded to hospitals. He later returned to the United States and his private practice. He moved from Minnesota to California, where he continued his medical work through his eighty-fifth year.