Isaac Behunin, the settler credited with naming Zion, farmed this canyon long before it was a park. Boone tells how the name met a stern critic, what was growing in the Behunin field, and why a family's chickens lost patience with the dusk. It comes down by word of mouth, told here as tradition, with no record from the time behind it.
Ever had the one man you couldn't argue with tell you your best idea wasn't good enough? The way it's told, Isaac Behunin did. Up the big canyon at the foot of this climb, not far from where Zion Lodge stands, he put up a one-room log cabin in the summer of eighteen sixty-three, the first settler's cabin in that canyon. The family cut down a cottonwood in the dooryard, hollowed a bowl into the top of the stump, bored a drain, and stopped it with a wooden plug. That was the washbasin. He'd been with the Mormons since New York. He helped raise the temple at Kirtland, Ohio, and for a time he stood bodyguard to Joseph Smith. He'd been driven out of Missouri and driven out of Illinois, and in this red rock he figured he had finally found a place nobody could chase him from. It seems he's the one who gave it the holiest name he owned. Zion. Now, every Behunin but the daughter smoked. Wild tobacco grew up that canyon, and the sharper tongues down valley said that was the real reason they'd moved in. Around eighteen seventy, the way it's told, Brigham Young paid a visit and made the hard trip up. He heard the name. He saw tobacco growing in the Behunin field. Zion, he said, is the pure in heart, and this is not Zion. I'll say this plainly. No record from that time proves a word of it. J.L. Crawford, born in Oak Creek in nineteen fourteen, handed it down with "so the story goes," and allowed it might only have been the rough road talking. Still, some of the faithful took it up and called the place Not Zion, and that name hung on for years. His enemies ran him out of two states. If the story's true, it took his own prophet to tell him he still hadn't arrived. The family had a joke about the place all the same. The summer of eighteen sixty-four they told a girl named Eunice that dusk ran so long in that canyon, the chickens went to roost at sundown, got tired of waiting for dark, and came back out. I can't swear to the prophet, friend, and I can't swear to the chickens. Leave me the sky still lit over that stump in the dooryard, the hens stepping out to see what was keeping the night, and an old man's smoke rising straight up over a place that wasn't Zion.
Photo: Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, Zion Canyon, 1903; Zion Museum Collection, ZION 38105 · Public domain (1903 work, artist died 1935; NPS record: Public domain)