page_title: Francis Dunlap Gamewell
section_title: The Semi-Siege
hierarchical_section_title: Francis Dunlap Gamewell / The Semi-Siege
caption_attribution_description: English: A photo of the "fighting parsons" published in Smith's book.
context_page_description: Francis Dunlap Gamewell was a Methodist missionary in China. He was the Chief of the Fortifications Committee in the Siege of the Legations during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and was acclaimed as one of the heroes of the siege.
context_section_description: The period between June 8 and June 20 is called the "semi-siege" as foreigners in Peking came increasingly under attack by the Boxers. Gamewell organized the defenses for American and British missionaries and several hundred Chinese Christians in the Methodist compound. He asked for and received 20 Marines from American Minister (Ambassador) Edwin H. Conger to assist him in the defense. The Church was converted into a fortress…"the altar was fenced around with a barricade of boxes of condensed milk, biscuit tins, baskets of household silver, etc" . The missionaries organized themselves into committees. Chinese Christians were conscripted to dig trenches and build stone and barbed wire barricades. It was good training for the siege to come. While the missionaries were fortifying their compound the Boxers were raging through Peking destroying foreign establishments and executing Chinese Christians. Foreign soldiers in the Legation Quarter exacerbated the situation by firing on Chinese demonstrators and mobs and killing many people.
caption: Frank Gamewell (second from left, standing) and the "Fighting Parsons" among their fortifications at the British Legation in Beijing
exif: {"Image Software": "Picasa 3.0", "Image ExifOffset": "50", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "312", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "8252", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0210", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2008:05:15 09:33:22", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2940", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3493", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "182", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "2f7b730b7967bfafb121149173bd6d0a"}