Few twentieth century mission stories have touched as many believers as that of five young American men killed while trying to bring the gospel to an isolated people in the Ecuadorian jungle. Pete Fleming, the youngest of the group, left his philosophy studies to serve among peoples who had never heard of Christ.
Peter Sillence Fleming was born on November 23, 1928, in Seattle, Washington. He accepted Christ as Savior at age 13, after hearing the testimony of a blind evangelist. He graduated as valedictorian of his high school class and also excelled in basketball and golf.
At the University of Washington, he studied philosophy and completed a master’s degree, while also leading the campus Christian group. His friendship with Jim Elliot, forged at Christian conferences and mountaineering trips, proved decisive: Elliot influenced him to set aside personal plans in order to devote himself fully to missions.
Under Elliot’s influence, Fleming temporarily broke off his engagement to Olive Ainslie, a childhood friend, in order to serve as a single missionary. The decision, read today with more caution than it was at the time, shows the real weight the missionary ideal placed on a relationship, and on Olive herself.
In 1952 he sailed for Ecuador alongside Elliot. The two reopened the Shandia mission station among the Quichua people, where Fleming helped establish a boarding school for indigenous boys. He married Olive on June 29, 1954, and together they later took over the Puyupungu station.
Operation Auca, an effort by five missionary families to make the first peaceful contact with the Huaorani, a people then known for violence against outsiders, began with flyovers and gift drops in September 1955. Fleming hesitated for months, in prayer, concerned also about Olive, and only confirmed his participation in early January 1956, days before the expedition to the beach on the Curaray River. He was the last of the group to join. The plan was carried out in secrecy, without formal approval from the mission agencies that supported the five men’s work, a decision mission historians later pointed to as risky given the Huaorani’s history of violence toward outsiders.
On January 8, 1956, on the third day of contact on a beach along the Curaray River, Huaorani warriors attacked and killed the five missionaries. Fleming, 27, was the youngest of the group and the only one without children; his body was identified by a red cloth belt.
The episode, recounted by Elisabeth Elliot in Through Gates of Splendor, inspired a new generation of missionaries around the world. Years later, Huaorani men who took part in the attack, such as Mincaye and Kimo, converted to Christianity and came to live in peace alongside relatives of their own victims.
