Part 6

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.

Protection was afforded by buck or rip-gut fences from cliff to river at each end of the farms. These were made of short poles set in the ground and pointed in various directions so as to effectively prevent large animals from breaking through.

Hand plows pulled by horses or oxen were used for turning the soil. Harrows were fashioned of hewn timbers fastened together in a triangle. Sharpened pegs of oak were fixed in holes bored in the framework and turned downward so that they scratched the ground when pulled by a team. The first shovels were short-handled, but later they had what they called “lazy man’s shovels,” because the handles were longer and a man did not have to bend his back so much when working. The rakes were handmade of wood with sharp pegs for teeth. Scythe and cradle were seldom used since little hay or grain was raised.

It was about this time that the canyon received its name. The three settlers, hardy mountaineers though they were, nevertheless were of a devout and religious turn of mind. It seems to have been old father Behunin who proposed the name of Zion, to which the others agreed. Isaac Behunin had been with the Mormons ever since they left New York. He had helped build the Temple at Kirtland, Ohio, and had at one time acted as body-guard to the founder of the Church, Joseph Smith. He had been through all the “drivings of the Saints” in Missouri and Illinois and nourished the typically bitter resentment towards the “enemies” 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 harryings and persecutions. No wonder he proposed the name Zion, which implies a resting place. He went even further, maintaining that should the Saints again be harassed by their enemies, this would become their place of refuge.

On one of Brigham Young’s visits to Springdale, probably in 1870, he was told of Zion. He inquired how it came to be so named. The explanation, it seems, was not satisfactory to the Mormon leader after a toilsome journey into the canyon and he questioned its propriety, saying that “it was not Zion.” Some of his more literal-minded followers thereafter called it “Not Zion.”

The first settlers made their way into the canyon on horseback, using the river bed, crossing and recrossing the stream. It soon became necessary, however, to provide other means of transportation. A wagon road was no problem through the flats in both the upper and lower valleys, but the precipitous canyon between was baffling. It is related[59] that Hyrum Morris, Shunesburg settler, and a companion were the first to enter the upper valley by means other than horseback. They hitched a yoke of oxen to the hind wheels of a wagon and lashed a plow and supplies on it. When they entered the canyon, near the present site of the bridge, they climbed the west bank over the sand bench, down into Birch Creek and thence into the upper Zion Valley. This did not prove to be a practicable route, and no one seems to have followed it. Today one can hardly traverse the route on foot.

The remains of an old cart road which followed the east bank, high up opposite the sand bench, coming out into the upper valley about half a mile above the present Union Pacific garage, may still be traced. This route was used for some years, but was far from satisfactory. Other settlers from the towns below began to cultivate tracts in the upper valley and the timber resources of the canyon made a better road imperative. During the winter of 1864-65, a wagon road[60] was built up the river bed, crossing the stream many times. This is the road which, with minor improvements, served as the main highway into Zion until the National Park Service built the road that first made it fully accessible to the public. This road in turn served until 1930, when the present well-graded highway was constructed midway between the river and the older road that it replaced.

It was while constructing this first wagon road on January 9, 1865, that George Ayers was killed. A short dugway was being graded on the slope above the river. With no blasting powder, the men were excavating a large boulder, and George Ayers and Orson Taylor had stopped to rest in the shade of the huge stone, rolling cigarettes. Suddenly it began to move. A shout of warning came from Samuel Wittwer and Heber Ayers. Taylor was able to scramble out of the way but Ayers was squarely in its path and it fell directly upon him, crushing and killing him instantly—the first victim of Zion Canyon.

Indian troubles, treated in a later chapter, broke out in the spring of 1866. Martial law was declared and instructions were issued from the military headquarters for the settlers to concentrate in towns of at least 150 families. It was at first decided to gather all the settlers of the Upper Virgin River at Rockville and Toquerville, and later, at Virgin. James Jepson[61] recalls that his father had just moved his cabin from Virgin to Rockville when the revised decision reached him and he moved back to Virgin again. This was the fifth time the cabin had been moved and his father dryly remarked that it was so used to the process now that all he had to do was throw the logs into the yard and they would fit themselves together.

This concentration order meant the abandonment of all smaller places: Duncan, Grafton, Northrop, Shunesburg, Springdale and Zion. Those who could not buy or rent a house simply dumped their belongings in the shade and set up housekeeping under the trees. Some moved their log houses with them, others made dugouts and still others built new log houses.

Although the outlying towns had been abandoned, the crops had been planted and had to be tended. Workers went in armed groups of ten, twenty, or thirty to the fields, usually remaining during the week in the more distant places and returning to Rockville on Sunday. In Zion, headquarters were at the Behunin cabin, where eight or ten men usually camped while working the crops. In Springdale, they usually stayed at Albert Petty’s home or nearby. Petty himself refused to abandon his ranch and stayed there throughout the Indian scare.

This concentration continued through 1867, but with the close of the “Black Hawk War” and the subsidence of troubles with the Paiutes, there was a general reoccupation of the villages except Long Valley and Kanab, abandoned during the Indian troubles. This occasioned some shifts in the population; some returned to their former homes and lands, some stayed where they were, and a few moved elsewhere. Springdale was reoccupied by Albert Petty and several other families, but it did not regain its former size until about 1874. Shunesburg and Grafton also seem to have lost slightly in population in the reshuffling. To Zion, however, the same settlers, Behunin, Heaps and Rolfs, returned and took up their usual tasks of raising crops and tending livestock.

The following years were prosperous and the settlements were greatly strengthened. Markets were established in northern Utah, at mining camps in southern Nevada, and even in California. Commerce was restricted because of transportation difficulties but it was an important factor in helping to balance needs by exchange of livestock products and cotton for goods the settlers could not produce.

The national financial panic of 1873 gradually worked its paralyzing effects into Utah and spread to the southern Utah colonies. The repercussions were not marked on the Virgin River, but Brigham Young was gravely concerned about the more general conditions in Utah when he came to St. George to spend his second winter there (November, 1873).

During the spring of 1874 he initiated near St. George a communistic movement known as the United Order. An experiment of similar nature had been tried by the Mormons in Missouri more than thirty years earlier. It was an attempt to combine cooperatively the efforts of the Saints, so that all might share the benefits in accordance with their needs. The scheme had been inaugurated in a few communities with encouraging success and it was now proposed to launch it on a large scale.[62] In February, St. George, Price City, and Washington were all organized on this basis. Price City, near St. George, is reported as the first working farm community in which the combined farms were managed as a unit and the farmers lived as one large family. Some of the men were assigned to irrigation, some to raising hay, corn, cane, garden stuff, or other crops according to the estimated needs of the community. Fuel was supplied seasonably by hauling wood from the scrub forests of the hills. The women were assigned as cooks, dish washers, baby tenders, clothes makers, and nurses. In Price and a few other places the settlers ate together, but in most of the communities each family had its own home.

On March 5, Brigham Young visited Virgin and Rockville and organized the United Order. During March and April, nearly all the settlements in Dixie fell in line and a confederation of all the settlements, known as the St. George Stake United Order, was set up to correlate the activities of the individual settlements.

During late April and early May, Brigham Young moved northward to Salt Lake City, initiating the novel movement in many of the towns along the way, including Cedar, Parowan, Beaver, Fillmore and Nephi. Upon reaching Salt Lake City, a general agency to correlate the stake activities, known as the “United Order for all the World,” was established.

The movement enjoyed only a brief period of prosperity. The utopian ideal encountered difficulties when it came to the division of benefits. Wages were assigned to each person and the benefits drawn were charged against each family. It was soon alleged that some were drawing more than their wages entitled them to, whereas others were not getting all that they felt they should.

In a few favored communities having access to large natural resources, such as abundant pasturage for livestock, either dairy or range, the produce was more than sufficient to pay the wages assigned and to build up a surplus capital. In most, however, where agriculture was the chief dependence and products of the farms were insufficient to pay wages, stinting was inevitable. Under such conditions, there was general dissatisfaction with the cooperative scheme and more progressive individuals sought to withdraw.

Many settlements abandoned the experiment at the end of the first season. Such was the case at Rockville, but Shunesburg and Springdale held on for another year, through 1875. A new ditch on higher ground was dug at Springdale at this time and the town was moved to its present location, half a mile north of its old site. This offered opportunity for expansion. The Gifford family from Shunesburg and several families from Rockville came to join the United Order in 1875.

It seems to have been the United Order movement which depopulated Zion Canyon. In 1872, Isaac Behunin, getting old, sold out to William Heap for two hundred bushels of corn, and moved to Mt. Carmel, then beginning to be resettled, where he later died. With the establishment of the United Order in Rockville in 1874, Heap and Rolf joined, turning over their property in Zion to the corporation. With the collapse of the Order in the fall, they withdrew their share of the proceeds and moved to Bear Lake and later to Star Valley, Wyoming.

These families were the last to live regularly in Zion Canyon. Farming, however, was still carried on by settlers living in the village below. Such names as Dennett, Gifford, Petty, Russell, Terry, Dalton, Crawford, Stout and Flanigan, recur as farmers in Zion in the following years. Oliver D. Gifford, long-time bishop of Springdale, related that about 1880 he was farming the land south of the river and west of the Great White Throne at the site of the grotto camp when the Great Red Arch fell out, the rock pulverizing and covering up a spring and large pine trees.

The Cable

Zion, since its discovery, had been regarded as a blind canyon. Even the Indian name, I-oo-goon (canyon like an arrow quiver), reflects this idea. Lee, Smith, Steele and their companions, who left Parowan on June 12, 1852, and explored the head-waters of the Sevier and Virgin, were balked by the Vermillion cliffs nearby, if not in Zion, in contemplating the possibilities of a road from the mountains to the lower valleys.

The early settlers of Rockville, needing timber from the mountains, had explored the probabilities of a road through the canyon without success. James H. Jennings recalls hearing Elijah Newman, an early settler of Rockville, tell that a team could be driven from the head of Parowan Canyon over Cedar Mountain to the rim of Zion Canyon and that he believed that some day a way would be found through the cliffs so that timber could be hauled down from the mountain.

Brigham Young himself had encouraged the idea on one of his trips to the upper Virgin, probably in 1863. It is related that when the settlers were bewailing the lack of timber for flooring their cabins, he stated in public meeting that the day would come when hundreds of thousands of feet of lumber would be brought down the canyon. The wise ones shook their heads and remarked that their leader had missed it this time.

During the early seventies the mail from St. George to Kanab was routed via Shunesburg. It was lifted over the 1,500 foot cliff at the head of Shunesburg canyon on wires[63] arranged in such a way that the man at the top bringing the mail from Kanab could exchange with the man below, carrying it down the river. This short-cut saved a day’s travel over the road via Pipe Springs and the Arizona Strip.

It was not until the new century had dawned, however, that young David Flanigan, who was but a small boy in the days of the Shunesburg wire-pulley apparatus, conceived the idea of lowering lumber over the cliffs by means of cables. As a lad of 15, in the spring of 1888, he and three other boys hunting on the East Rim of Zion had seen a large grove of yellow pine sawtimber and had stood at the top of the cliff later known as Cable Mountain, where the precipice appeared to reach almost to the floor of the canyon. The problem of lumber remained as acute then as it was in the days of his parents.

Ten years later, needing lumber for himself, he was forced to go to the Trumbull or Kaibab mountains, a trip requiring a full week. The advantage of obtaining lumber nearer home on the rim of Zion thus impressed itself upon him. He advocated the idea of lowering it on a cable but found no supporters. Convinced of the practical wisdom of the idea, he undertook the work alone in 1900. He bought 50,000 feet of wire and stretched it around pulleys and drums at top and bottom making a circular series, half of which had three wires, and half five. The five-ply half was to run around the drum where the weight would be greatest.

After two or three years of experimenting with pulleys and wire tension, he finally perfected his device. To cut the timber, he bought an old saw-mill in the summer or fall of 1904. Thus Flanigan’s ingenuity made it possible for vast quantities of lumber to go down Zion Canyon. By Christmas, 1906, two hundred thousand feet of sawed lumber had actually been lowered on his cable.

It was during the summer of 1906 that the writer first visited Zion Canyon. From Orderville he faced a trip by horse to his home in St. George. Rather than retrace his steps by way of Kanab and Pipe Springs, he inquired about the short-cut via Zion and was directed cross-country to the head of the old East Rim trail, which John Winder had recently made barely passable. Belated, he reached the top of the trail at sundown, and familiar as he was with mountaineering, started unhesitatingly on the 3,000 foot descent. Darkness found him well along the trail which grew increasingly hard to follow. About half way down, he met Winder and some cowboys coming up. They described the trail and said they had just lost a pack horse which had rolled over the cliffs below and they had been delayed in retrieving the pack.

A full moon was just coming up over the cliffs at his back, throwing light into the dark recesses along the way. With its help the steep, dangerous places on the trail were negotiated without difficulty. The dead pack horse was found beside the trail and the bottom of the canyon was reached about 11 p.m., when the full moon was shining into the depths of the canyon and towers and temples were illumined with snowy brightness. Camping there, he slept out the night in his saddle blankets under the enchanting witchery of the starry heavens between the brilliant walls that seemed to reach the sky.

In 1906 Flanigan sold out to Alfred P. Stout[64] and O. D. Gifford. They replaced his wire cable with a heavier twisted rope cable, which served for many years and over which millions of feet of lumber were lowered into the canyon and hauled to the settlements farther downstream. Stout established a shingle mill in Zion Canyon about a quarter of a mile below the cable and near the foot of the northeast corner of the Great White Throne. At first, large cottonwood logs were cut for shingles, but as these proved of inferior quality, yellow pine logs were supplied via cable. The shingle mill was washed away by floods two years later.

A sad accident occurred at the top of the cable on July 28, 1908. A party of young people vacationing on the east rim went over to see the cable operate from the top. Three of them were standing in the box at the edge, directly under the cable, looking into the depths of the canyon, when a bolt of lightning struck the cable, killing Thornton Hepworth, Jr., and stunning Clarinda Langston and Lionel Stout. Miss Langston fell limp on the edge of the box where she was in imminent danger of plummeting down the cliff. Miss Elza Stout, uninjured nearby, rescued her from the precarious position, but before assistance could be rendered him, a second bolt struck the wire and killed Lionel Stout. Miss Langston recovered, but the bodies of the two boys were lowered into the canyon over the cable.

It was more than a year later when people started to “ride the cable.” About the middle of September, 1910, soon after Zion had been proclaimed a national monument, some members of Scott P. Stewart’s surveying party visited the top of the cable. They were told that a dog had been sent up from below and that he was nearly crazy when he reached the top. Quinby Stewart, a fearless youth, told them that if they would bring some watermelons up to the foot, he would go down on the cable and help eat them. True to his word, when the melons arrived he climbed on a load of lumber ready to be lowered, and holding to the cable, rode safely to the bottom. It was a swift flight of two minutes, and to a young man of his disposition a rousing thrill. Others followed suit, and after eating the melons, rode back to the top in the empty cage.

Riding the cable proved an attraction for those gifted with strong nerves. At a later date, Frank Petty came to operate the sawmill at the top of the cliff. He was a large man, weighing nearly 300 pounds, too heavy to travel comfortably up and down the trails, and the road around the Arizona strip to his home in Rockville being too long for convenience, he took to riding the cable. On one occasion, as he started down, the lumber on which he was riding struck the top of the cliff and loosened the chain holding one end of the load. His son, Frank, operating the brakes at the top, seeing the mishap, applied the brakes just in time to prevent his father from falling down the face of the 1,800 foot declivity. With a few inches of the lumber still clinging to the edge and his father paralyzed with fear and afraid to move for fear of jarring it loose, Frank climbed underneath and re-fastened the chain. With a sigh of relief, he then lowered his father in safety to the bottom.

Kane County and Arizona

Just as the settlement of Iron County had provided a stepping stone to the exploration and settlement of the Virgin River Valley, so in turn, the latter served in like stead in opening up Kane County and the Kaibab National Forest of northern Arizona.

In the fall of 1858, after Albert Sydney Johnston’s army had entered Utah, Brigham Young, still doubtful about the future, instructed missionaries under Jacob Hamblin’s leadership to cross the Colorado River to the southeast and visit the Moquis or Town Indians with the object of exploring the possibilities of retreating with his people to this region should the difficulties with the army become unbearable.[65]

Accordingly, Jacob Hamblin, one of the leading figures in Utah’s southern frontier, left the Santa Clara on October 28, 1858, with a party of twelve, including an Indian guide, a Spanish interpreter, and a Welsh interpreter, the last because of wildly erroneous reports that the Moquis spoke a variant of that tongue. The Indian led them through the Arizona strip via Pipe Springs and Kaibab to the old Ute ford where Escalante had crossed eighty-two years earlier. The visit to the Moquis was brief, some of the men returning in November, the others later in the winter. This expedition revealed the general topography between the Virgin and Colorado.

A second missionary expedition to the Moquis was undertaken in the fall of 1859, leaving the Santa Clara headquarters on October 20 and reaching the Moquis on November 6. Hamblin appointed Marion J. Shelton and Thales Haskell to remain there for the winter and returned home with the rest of the party.[66] Friendship with the Moquis was cultivated by the missionaries, but this seems to have led to difficulties with the Navajo.[67]