Nathanael Saint, known as Nate Saint, took his first flight at age seven with his older brother Sam, a future commercial pilot. Born in 1923 near Hershey, Pennsylvania, he grew up in a large family and discovered early the passion that would define his entire life: flying.
He enlisted in the United States Army at nineteen, hoping to fly during World War II. A recurring leg infection, the result of a childhood injury, flared up again near the end of cadet training and kept him out of military cockpits before he could complete combat pilot training.
In 1947, he studied for about a year at Wheaton College, where he met Marjorie Farris, whom he married on February 14, 1948. That same year, the couple left for Ecuador, sent by Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF), to open an air support base in Shell Mera.
For eight years, Nate flew medicine, supplies, and news to missionaries and isolated communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where roads were practically nonexistent. He perfected a technique of his own: lowering a bucket tied to a line while circling tightly overhead, keeping the object nearly still in the air.
In September 1955, he teamed up with Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Pete Fleming, and Roger Youderian to attempt contact with the Waodani people, then called “Auca” by their neighbors, known for their history of violence against outsiders. In October, he used the bucket for the first time to deliver gifts by air; in all, thirteen drops prepared the ground.
The decision to seek direct contact was made hastily and partly in secrecy from the mission organization itself, which never formally authorized the operation, and decades later mission historians would debate whether this underestimated the risk to the five men and to the Waodani people themselves.
On January 3, 1956, the group camped on a beach along the Curaray River. Five days later, on January 8, Nate Saint and his four companions were speared to death by Waodani warriors, an event that Life magazine would carry to the whole world.
Nate’s sister, Rachel Saint, and Jim Elliot’s widow, Elisabeth Elliot, remained among the Waodani in the years that followed. Several warriors, including some who took part in the ambush, converted to Christianity, and decades later Nate’s son, Steve, returned to live among them.
