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On Wednesday, January 11, 1956, a Piper Cruiser PA-14 dipped slowly over the Curaray River in eastern Ecuador. Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) pilot Johnny Keenan leaned out the window, looking, looking. Below him squatted the stripped remains of another yellow Piper. Nothing stirred. Then, about a quarter mile downriver, he saw the khaki pants and white shirt of a young man floating face down in the water. Johnny reached for his radio.

On the other end of his call, some 50 miles away at Shell Mera, sat pilot wife, Marj Saint. She listened to Johnny's message as three other women hovered at her side.

Late on Wednesday the body of law student-turned-missionary, Ed McCully, was identified by Quichua Indians who knew him. Unable to retrieve the body from the Curaray, they tossed McCully's size 13 1/2 shoe on the shore and brought back his watch.

On Friday, January 13, a search party hiked and canoed their way through 25 miles of jungle to rendezvous with Ecuadorian soldiers, other Quichuas, a U.S. military officer, and Life photographer Cornell Capa. They found what was left of a dream: a few personal effects, an overturned pot of beans, and, in the water, the bodies of four young missionaries. They were World War II paratrooper Roger Youderian, budding scholar Peter Fleming, the intensely spiritual, indomitable Jim Elliot, and the imaginative, technologically creative MAF pilot Nate Saint. The search party buried the bodies just inside the jungle during a torrential downpour. Jack Shalanko, who helped, later wrote, "They were decomposed beyond recognition. Some still had spears in them."

These men between the ages of 27 and 32 were husbands and fathers (eight children ages seven and younger among them, with one more baby due in a month). All shared a passion for taking the good news to those who had never heard the name of Jesus. "Operation Auca" was over. Or was it?

The dream had taken shape in the minds of Saint, Elliot, McCully, and Fleming. The first three had known each other at Wheaton College, where Saint had taken a year's classes and where Elliot and McCully were campus leaders, star athletes, and notorious practical jokers. Other missionaries nicknamed them "the Brethren boys," since all worked under the auspices of the Plymouth Brethren. In conversations together they had wondered if they might be able to make peaceful contact with an isolated and hostile indigenous group in Ecuador, then called "Aucas" ("savage" in the lowland Quichua language) and now known by the name they give themselves, "Waorani" ("the people").

In late 1955, approximately 500 Waorani lived scattered across a territory about the size of Connecticut. Their lands were only a short plane ride from the locations where Elliot, McCully, and Saint were posted. Moving frequently and living in small clearings, the Waorani were hard for outsiders to locate. Most didn't want to, since the Indians greeted all visitors with eight-foot-long spears. However, in September 1955, when Saint and Fleming spotted a number of Wao clearings, they thought they could use the airplane to prepare the way for peaceful ground contact.

Between October 6 and December 23, Saint, accompanied by either McCully or Elliot, made 13 flights over the Wao clearings. Fleming provided prayer and financial support from his station. Saint lowered gifts to the ground. First, they sent down an aluminum cooking pot decorated with floating ribbons, then buttons, pants, shirts (the Waorani wore only cotton G-strings), an ax head, knives, photos, machetes. The Waorani received these gifts with smiles and laughter. They began to return gifts: a headband, woven thread, smoked monkey tail, two squirrels, a parrot. During these exchanges the men shouted carefully mouthed phrases in the Wao language, which they had picked up from Dayuma, a young Wao woman who had fled tribal violence only to live in servitude at a nearby hacienda.

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March (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50