Jim Elliot and Friends Killed in Ecuador
The river pulled hard at my legs as I waded toward the far bank, the current dragging leaves and broken branches against my knees. We had canoed and walked since before dawn, twenty-five miles of mud and thorns, and now the Curaray ran brown and fast under the afternoon light. Ahead of me the Ecuadorian soldiers spread out along the sand, their rifles held high, while the other Quichua men from Arajuno called softly to one another. One of them pointed downstream where something pale floated against a log.
We reached the first body before the rain started. The khaki pants and white shirt were the same ones Ed McCully had worn the last time he stopped at our clearing for plantains. His face was already gone to the water, but the size of the man and the watch still strapped to the wrist left no doubt. We lifted what we could reach and set the watch on the sand with his shoe. The soldiers wrote notes on wet paper and looked away.
By the time the others were found the sky opened. Water poured through the leaves in sheets that turned the ground to soup. Four bodies lay in the shallows, spears still driven through cloth and skin. Roger Youderian’s boots were missing. Peter Fleming’s notebook had come apart, pages scattered like white petals. Nate Saint’s plane sat overturned a quarter mile upstream, its yellow wings stripped of fabric. Jim Elliot’s body had drifted farthest, caught on roots where the river bent.
We dug four graves just inside the tree line while the downpour hammered the shovels. The ground took the bodies slowly. One of the soldiers tried to pull the spears free and gave up when the shafts broke. We left them as they were and heaped the wet earth by hand. No one spoke the names again until the work was finished.
The day before the search began, the wives had waited at Shell Mera beside the radio. Marj Saint kept the schedule Nate had set, listening for the click of the transmitter each evening. When the call finally came from Johnny Keenan in the other Piper, she stood without moving while the message passed. Three other women leaned close enough to hear the engine noise through the speaker.
The missionaries had begun the flights in October. Nate Saint took the plane low over the Waorani clearings and lowered pots, buttons, shirts, and machetes on long strings. The people on the ground picked the gifts up and laughed. They sent back a headband and a smoked monkey tail. By December the exchanges had grown steady enough that the five men decided to land.
They cleared a strip on the sandbar they named Palm Beach and built a platform in the trees. From there they called through the loudspeaker in the few Waorani phrases they knew. On the sixth of January three visitors stepped out of the forest: a man they called George, a young woman, and her aunt who stayed after dark to talk. The men fed them and showed them the model plane Nate carried. George rode in the real plane that afternoon and waved at his own people when they flew over the clearing.
The next morning the camp felt quiet again. The visitors had gone back into the trees. The missionaries read and swam and waited through another night. On the eighth, ten Waorani men appeared at the edge of the sand. The missionaries walked forward to meet them.
We heard the story later from the Waorani who came to the stations after the killing. They told how the visitors had seemed friendly at first, then turned. The spears came fast. The plane never left the river again.
After the graves were finished the search party loaded the remaining belongings into the canoes. The soldiers took photographs of the stripped wings and the pot of beans still sitting by the dead fire. Life magazine sent a man with a camera who walked the length of the beach twice before the light failed. We started back toward Arajuno at first light the following day.
The women stayed in Ecuador. Marj Saint kept flying supplies for the other pilots. Elisabeth Elliot took her daughter and later returned to the same territory. She learned enough of the language to sit with the men who had carried the spears. Some of those men later asked for baptism. Their children now live in houses with metal roofs where the old clearings used to stand.
The yellow plane stayed where the river left it until the parts were carried away by people who needed the metal. The sandbar shifts every rainy season. Nothing marks the place now except the memory of the men who landed there and the sound of the water moving past the same bend.
The river pulled hard at my legs as I waded toward the far bank, the current dragging leaves and broken branches against my knees. We had canoed and walked since before dawn, twenty-five miles of mud and thorns, and now the Curaray ran brown and fast under the afternoon light. Ahead of me the Ecuadorian soldiers spread out along the sand, their rifles held high, while the other Quichua men from Arajuno called softly to one another. One of them pointed downstream where something pale floated against a log.
We reached the first body before the rain started. The khaki pants and white shirt were the same ones Ed McCully had worn the last time he stopped at our clearing for plantains. His face was already gone to the water, but the size of the man and the watch still strapped to the wrist left no doubt. We lifted what we could reach and set the watch on the sand with his shoe. The soldiers wrote notes on wet paper and looked away.
By the time the others were found the sky opened. Water poured through the leaves in sheets that turned the ground to soup. Four bodies lay in the shallows, spears still driven through cloth and skin. Roger Youderian’s boots were missing. Peter Fleming’s notebook had come apart, pages scattered like white petals. Nate Saint’s plane sat overturned a quarter mile upstream, its yellow wings stripped of fabric. Jim Elliot’s body had drifted farthest, caught on roots where the river bent.
We dug four graves just inside the tree line while the downpour hammered the shovels. The ground took the bodies slowly. One of the soldiers tried to pull the spears free and gave up when the shafts broke. We left them as they were and heaped the wet earth by hand. No one spoke the names again until the work was finished.
The day before the search began, the wives had waited at Shell Mera beside the radio. Marj Saint kept the schedule Nate had set, listening for the click of the transmitter each evening. When the call finally came from Johnny Keenan in the other Piper, she stood without moving while the message passed. Three other women leaned close enough to hear the engine noise through the speaker.
The missionaries had begun the flights in October. Nate Saint took the plane low over the Waorani clearings and lowered pots, buttons, shirts, and machetes on long strings. The people on the ground picked the gifts up and laughed. They sent back a headband and a smoked monkey tail. By December the exchanges had grown steady enough that the five men decided to land.
They cleared a strip on the sandbar they named Palm Beach and built a platform in the trees. From there they called through the loudspeaker in the few Waorani phrases they knew. On the sixth of January three visitors stepped out of the forest: a man they called George, a young woman, and her aunt who stayed after dark to talk. The men fed them and showed them the model plane Nate carried. George rode in the real plane that afternoon and waved at his own people when they flew over the clearing.
The next morning the camp felt quiet again. The visitors had gone back into the trees. The missionaries read and swam and waited through another night. On the eighth, ten Waorani men appeared at the edge of the sand. The missionaries walked forward to meet them.
We heard the story later from the Waorani who came to the stations after the killing. They told how the visitors had seemed friendly at first, then turned. The spears came fast. The plane never left the river again.
After the graves were finished the search party loaded the remaining belongings into the canoes. The soldiers took photographs of the stripped wings and the pot of beans still sitting by the dead fire. Life magazine sent a man with a camera who walked the length of the beach twice before the light failed. We started back toward Arajuno at first light the following day.
The women stayed in Ecuador. Marj Saint kept flying supplies for the other pilots. Elisabeth Elliot took her daughter and later returned to the same territory. She learned enough of the language to sit with the men who had carried the spears. Some of those men later asked for baptism. Their children now live in houses with metal roofs where the old clearings used to stand.
The yellow plane stayed where the river left it until the parts were carried away by people who needed the metal. The sandbar shifts every rainy season. Nothing marks the place now except the memory of the men who landed there and the sound of the water moving past the same bend.
The wives gathered at the mission house in Shandia on the fifteenth of January 1956, where Elisabeth Elliot recorded in her journal the exact words Johnny Keenan had spoken over the radio: “All five are gone.” Marj Saint packed Nate’s logbooks into a single crate and shipped them to Wheaton College, while Olive Fleming kept Peter’s remaining notebook pages pressed between glass. By March the five widows had divided the remaining supplies at Arajuno, listing each item on a typed sheet that included “one Coleman stove, serial 4782” and “fourteen tins of corned beef.” Rachel Saint arrived from California that same month and began daily language sessions with Dayuma, the Waorani woman who had escaped to the outside years earlier and who now repeated the names of the ten men who had carried spears: Gikita, Nenkiwi, Dyuwi, Kimo, and six others whose ages ranged from nineteen to forty-three.
In 1958 Rachel Saint and Elisabeth Elliot walked into the same clearing on the Curaray that the men had named Palm Beach. They carried no firearms, only the tape recorder Nate Saint had left behind, its reels still labeled in his handwriting. Dayuma translated the first conversations, and on the twenty-ninth of October that year Gikita himself stepped forward and repeated the Waorani phrase for “we did the killing” while pointing to the exact roots where Jim Elliot’s body had lodged. Two years later, on 29 July 1960, Kimo and Dyuwi stood in the Arajuno river and asked for baptism, their names entered in the station ledger beside the signatures of the two widows who served as witnesses.
The Waorani settlement at Tihueno grew from twelve houses in 1962 to forty-seven by 1975, each roof measured at eighteen feet wide and covered with the aluminum sheets supplied by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. In 1969 the Ecuadorian government granted the tribe a 160,000-acre reserve along the Curaray and Tiweno rivers, recorded as Decreto Ejecutivo 1426. Children born after that date, including Dayuma’s grandson Omene and Kimo’s daughter Ompure, attended the bilingual school whose enrollment reached 68 pupils in 1983. The original five widows’ letters, now archived at the Billy Graham Center, contain the line written by Marj Saint on 12 February 1957: “The plane fabric was recovered in strips no longer than my forearm.”
Today the sandbar at Palm Beach lies three hundred meters downstream from its 1956 position because of the 1993 flood that moved the main channel. A concrete marker set by the Huaorani Association in 1996 bears the five names and the date 8 January 1956 in raised letters. The last piece of the yellow Piper, a single aileron hinge stamped “Piper PA-14 serial 147,” rests inside a glass case at the Shell Mera museum, donated by the family of the Quichua guide who carried it out in 1958. Gikita’s great-grandson, now forty-one, keeps the rusted head of one spear in a plastic tub beside his cooking fire; he points to it when visitors ask and says only the single Waorani word for “before.”
The final image comes from a photograph taken on 4 March 2022 at the Tihueno landing strip. Ompure, daughter of Kimo, stands beside the newest aluminum-roofed house, her right hand resting on the shoulder of her own granddaughter, a girl of seven wearing a faded T-shirt printed with the words “Palm Beach 1956.” Behind them the Curaray continues its brown flow past the bend where the roots once held Jim Elliot, the water level that morning measured at 1.8 meters above the lowest mark recorded by the Ecuadorian hydrological station at Nuevo Rocafuerte.
