A History of Isaac Behunin as told by Ira Carrell Buchanan and Eunice Munk Buchanan (Behunin) on audio tapes

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The next record that we have of Isaac and his family is that they were the first settlers in Ephraim Utah. This taken from the Centennial history of Sand Pete County from 1849 to 1947 which is in the possession of my dear wife and I want her to read it.

Eunice Munk Buchanan(Behunin): Little is written about Isaac Behunin. The most that we have has come down by way of lore. That history is finally reduced to a terse paragraph to begin with,

"The first settler of Ephraim was Isaac Behunin who located on Pine Creek, now Cottonwood. Where he claimed 40 acres of land and made a dugout. Where he spent the winter of 1852 and 1853 with his wife and nine children. Toward the close of 53 he moved to Manti, owing to Indian trouble."

Histories are such lifeless skeletons. Imagination has to breathe the breath of life into them and put blood into their veins. Can you picture Isaac Behunin? A tall man perhaps, with a weather-beaten face and heavy beard building a dugout on the old postmaster place by the creek. Eleven souls in one damp room. The fall, the endless winter, the children sick, perhaps the baby coughing, provisions running low. The cold days and the long bitter nights, the constant fear, January, February, March. Isaac Behunin his gun ever close at hand. His wife running in from the wood pile, "Moccasin tracks Isaac, Indians! They were here last night."

April and the growing fear, "Isaac I saw them crouching behind the woodpile."

May and Isaac Behunin barricaded behind his dugout roof, an arrow whizzing past his head. His wife, white-faced and frantic, "The baby Isaac, an arrow grazed his head. Isaac I can't bear it any longer we'll be massacred. Let's go back to Manti Isaac."

June-Isaac Behunin his wife and nine children packed into a covered wagon the slow oxen plodding toward the fort at Manti.

Early in 1854 a larger group of saints moved back to Ephraim and among them was Isaac Behunin and his family. From the writing of Mrs. Fanny Thompson. She says, "When my father saw Isaac Behunin in 1853 Behunin told him it was no use to settle on Pine Creek as there was only water enough in the creek for the Behunin's farm."

We do not know how long he stayed there as we have no record of when he left.

Zion Canyon

Ira Carrell Buchanan(Behunin): The next thing that I would like to bring out is a little piece we find in The History of Southern Utah and Its National Parks by Angus M. Woodberry.

He said Isaac Behunin came to Dixie in the fall of 1861 and settled at North Rock until they had a flood there in Jan. 1862. After which he moved to Springdale and he built a house. In addition to farming in Springdale he visited Zion or Zion's canyon in the summer of 1863 and he started some operations there, building a one room log cabin, not far from where Zion Lodge now stands.

My grandfather, Elijah Cutler Behunin, said that it was Joseph Black who interested his father in Zion's canyon. He said that Black had made a trip into the canyon before we, that is speaking of this family, came here. And in talking to my father, he praised it so highly that my father became interested and he moved into the canyon upon Black's advice and suggestion. The cabin they built was a crude shelter used only during the summer, but the Behunin's wintered in Springdale. It was built of cottonwood logs and the cracks were chinked with mud. The roof had ridge poles to which ash and maple sticks were lashed on either side and covered with corn fodder and dirt.

The single room had a door and a window with glass panes. At one side was a fireplace but the cooking was usually done on a step stove outside. He said the Behunin's are real mountaineers, enduring the hardships of their life. To make a washbasin they cut down a cottonwood tree in the dooryard and they scooped out a bowl-like depression in the top of the stump. A hole was bored in the bottom downward and outward. This was stopped on the outside with a wooden plug. To wash, they dipped fresh water into the bowl.

The family included, in addition to the parents, five sons and one daughter. The cabin seems to have been completed late in the season after the corn had been harvested. There was no road into Zion's Canyon at that time but a heavy team had hauled in a plow and other accessories. An irrigation ditch was dug and the flats cleared of vines and rose bushes. By the next season, several acres were under cultivation and fruit trees came and garden stuff had been planted.

The Behunin's also owned 15 or 20 head of cattle, all broken to work including the milk cows. They raised pigs on the surplus corn and they did their own butchering and curing. James H. Jennings, who was born in 1853, tells of watching the Behunin's slaughter 13 hogs in one day. He said they filled a shallow pool with water and they heated it by dropping into it hot rocks from a nearby bon fire. When the water was near boiling, they dipped the hogs in the pool to scald the hair off of them, to loosen the hair.. The meat was cut up and salted to make old style ham cured hams, shoulders, and bacon. Miss Eunice Munk of Manti, who as a girl of 12 or 14 years of age, spent more than a year in Springdale. And she recalled that in the summer of 1864, the Behunin's told her that in Zion's canyon the chicken's went to roost soon after sundown but that the twilight was so long that they would get tired of waiting for darkness and they would come out again.

"Another little interesting thing about Zion's canyon is," Mr. Woodbury says in his book, "that it was about this time that the canyon received its name. These early settlers, hardy pioneers though they were, nevertheless were of devout and religious turn of mind. It seems to have been," he says, "old father Behunin who proposed the name Zion, to which the others agreed.

"Isaac Behunin had been with the Mormons ever since they left New York. He had helped build a temple at Kirtland, Ohio, and had at one time acted as bodyguard to the founder of the church, Joseph Smith. He had been through all the drivings of the saints in Missouri and Illinois. And he nourished the typical bitter resentment toward the enemy, who had been responsible for such atrocities. Here in Zion he felt that at last he had reached a place of safety where he could rest assured of no more periling and persecutions. No wonder he proposed the name Zion, which inspires a resting place. He went even further, maintaining that should the saints again be harassed by their enemies, that they could all come there and it would become their place of refuge.

"In one of Brigham Young's visits to Springdale probably in the spring of 1870 he was told of Zion. He inquired how it came to be so named and the explanation it seemed was not satisfactory to him and after a toilsome journey into the canyon he questioned the right of the property of the name saying it was not Zion. Of course some of the early political minded followers for a while called the canyon Not Zion."

Of course now I read that from this little book A History of Southern Utah and Its National Parks as I said by Angus M. Woodberry.

The way two stories in that came to me, from my Grandfather, who by the way spent many years of, quite a few of his young life in there. I guess he was 17, 18 years old when he left or somewhere close to there.

Regarding the wash basin they built out in the back. I can still close my eyes and see it, as it was explained to me even many years ago. For Grandpa said that it was just outside the door of the cabin, that they had cut down this tree, and that is where his father hued the bowl out. But it also, there was a creek, a small stream of water, running through right there and it was only just a short step from the wash bowl to the creek. So there was a simple matter for them when they wanted fresh water. He said that they could reach down, without hardly taking a step, and they could get a bucket full of water. And he said that, he told about how his father had drilled a hole to drain the wash basin. How he'd taken his old brace and bit and how he'd drilled a hole down through the bottom. He made it in the process of two holes one went straight down through, the bottom of the through the stump, through the bottom of the basin, in the center. And then he had gone on the outside of the stump and, with the same brace and the same bit, he had drilled a hole in, on an angle upward, in order to intersect the one from straight down and this is the one they plugged with a cork.

The other story, as it came to me, was just a little bit different in the naming of Zion. However, it was great-grandfather Isaac who proposed the name. I have been told, by my uncle, who was the youngest of Grandfather's children, that Isaac, after he settled in Zion's canyon, he thought it was nice and he was able to raise everything that he needed, he felt for his needs, and it was real comfortable in there and it was a place that he looked on as Zion. So he wrote a letter to President Brigham Young and he said to him, "Come on down and bring the saints down here. You stopped too soon because I have actually found Zion."

Now Brigham Young wrote a letter back. President Brigham Young wrote a letter back and he said, "That is not Zion," he said, "Zion is where the saints are at."

This is the story the way I received it. Now one other addition, the Mrs. Eunice Munk of Manti who was a girl of 12 or 14 years old in 1864, and spent the summer with the Behunin's, was a grand aunt of my dearly beloved wife Eunice, whom she was named for. I guess it was only fitting that the Behunin's and the Munk's got together again. Which seemed to be my lot in 1933. And then if you want to really confuse genealogy, this original Eunice Brown Munk who was a grand aunt of my dear wife, was originally a daughter of Eunice Pectal, which is in my direct line of . . . here let Mama straighten it out.

Eunice Munk Buchanan(Behunin): Eunice Pectal was the daughter of George Pectal and Sarah Recer who are the direct ancestors of George William Carrell and Dorothy Pectal.

Ira Carrell Buchanan(Behunin): These are my mother's folks. So you can see by that when you get it straightened out, the Behunin's and the Eunice's have been mixed up before somewhere. Of course, I didn't know this when I first met the girl and proposit . . . I mean proposed to her.(chuckling) I didn't know this when I proposed to her, that we was almost related, or could have been related or maybe we was. Anyway, I'd rather think that my pact was made with her and her pact was made with me, in the Heavens above, before we ever came to this earth. That's the way I like to think about that.