Isaac Behunin, born October 20, 1803, in Richland, New York, was a Mormon pioneer, early Utah settler, and is credited with naming Zion Canyon. A farmer who also helped build the Erie Canal and other canals during the canal craze of the 1800s, he married Meribah Morton in 1823, joined the Mormon Church in 1833, moved to Kirtland, Ohio, knew Joseph Smith, at times served as one of his body guards, helped build the Kirtland and Nauvoo Temples, was ordained an Elder and later a Seventy and High Priest, and served a short mission to Iowa. After Meribah died in Kirtland in 1834, leaving three sons, he married Elmina Tyler that same year, and over the next 19 years they had nine more children. He and his family endured the losses, hardships, and persecutions of the driving of the saints through Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa until migrating to Utah in 1850. Sent to Provo soon after arriving in Salt Lake City, he moved to Sanpete County in 1852 and became the first settler in Ephraim, where his family lived alone on Pine Creek in a dugout during the winter of 1852, farmed 40 acres in 1853, and later moved because of Indian trouble. He and his sons served in the Sanpete Militia and helped build forts in Ephraim and Manti, while his son William was killed by Indians during a mission at Elk Mountain near Moab. In 1861 he was called to the Cotton Mission in southern Utah, settled at Northrup at the forks of the Virgin River in December 1861, then moved after flooding farther up Zion Creek Fork, where he built a home, farmed, and became one of the first settlers of Springdale. In the summer of 1863 he and his sons built a cabin, cleared land, and farmed in Zion Canyon near the present site of the lodge while also maintaining their home in Springdale, and he is credited with naming the canyon when he said, “A man can worship God among these great cathedrals as well as he can in any man-made church; this is Zion.” He sold his canyon farm in 1872 for 200 bushels of corn, moved to Long Valley, and died in May 1881 at age 78; Elmina, who had been baptized in Lake Erie in the winter of 1833 through three feet of ice and endured the repeated moves and hardships of frontier life, died September 29, 1883, at age 72.