Jim Elliot and the Auca Mission
In January 1956 five young American missionaries were speared to death by Waorani warriors in eastern Ecuador — a story whose aftermath became one of the most cited mission accounts of the 20th century.
Jim Elliot (1927–1956), Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Pete Fleming and Roger Youderian were five young American missionaries working in eastern Ecuador in the mid-1950s. Their target was the Waorani (then known to outsiders as "Auca"), a small Amazonian people known for cycles of revenge killings against outsiders and each other.
After months of dropping gifts from Nate Saint's Piper PA-14 floatplane, the team landed on a sandbar of the Curaray River — "Palm Beach" — on January 3, 1956. On January 8, six Waorani warriors speared all five men to death. Their bodies were recovered by a joint U.S.–Ecuadorian search party.
The story took its decisive turn over the following years: Jim Elliot's widow Elisabeth, Nate Saint's sister Rachel, and Saint's son Steve eventually went to live among the same Waorani community. Several of the men who had killed the missionaries became Christians; Steve Saint was later baptised by one of them. The episode is recounted in Elisabeth Elliot's Through Gates of Splendor (1957) and the 2005 documentary Beyond the Gates of Splendor.