The Behunins were real mountaineers, inured to the hardships of their life. To make a wash basin, they cut down a cottonwood tree in the dooryard and 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 by 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. All except the daughter were confirmed smokers. Indian tobacco grew well in Zion Canyon in those days and at first they could gather their supplies from the wild plants. Indeed, their more censorious neighbors ventured the opinion that the wild tobacco was the inducement that led the Behunins into Zion Canyon. Later they introduced domestic varieties.
The cabin seems to have been completed late in the season after the corn had been harvested. There was no road into Zion Canyon at that time, but a heavy team had hauled in a plow and other necessities. An irrigation ditch was dug and the flats cleared of vines and rosebushes. By the next season several acres were under cultivation, and fruit trees, cane and garden stuff had been planted.
The Behunins also owned fifteen or twenty head of cattle all broken to work, including milk cows. They raised pigs on the surplus corn and did their own butchering and curing. James H. Jennings (born in 1853) tells of watching them slaughter thirteen hogs one day. They filled a shallow pool with water and heated it by dropping into it hot rocks from a nearby bonfire. When the water was near boiling, they dipped the hogs in the pool to scald them and loosen the hair. The meat was cut up and salted to make old-style home-cured hams, shoulders and bacon.
The Watchman, overlooking Springdale in Zion Canyon. Photo by O. J. Grimes.
The Angel Landing in Zion Canyon. Photo by U. S. National Park Service.
Mrs. Eunice Munk of Manti, who as a girl of 12 or 14 spent more than a year in Springdale, recalled that in the summer of 1864 the Behunins told her that in Zion Canyon the chickens went to roost soon after sundown, but that the twilight was so long that they would get tired of waiting for darkness and come out again.
Within a few years, other settlers found their way into the canyon. William Heap took up a farm across the river from the Behunins at the mouth of Emerald Pool Canyon and built a log cabin on the west bank of the river north of the Emerald Pool stream. He planted an orchard and raised annual crops such as cane, corn, and garden stuff. John Rolf built his cabins above the Behunins. A polygamist, he needed separate dwellings for his families; one he located near the Behunins; the other on the site of the present grotto camp.