Elijah Cutler Behunin and his family built this one-room cabin in 1882 as some of the earliest Mormon pioneers to try to establish homesteads in the Capitol Reef area after seeking religious freedom and self-sufficient communities in remote Utah. Life in the rugged desert brought constant hardship, with isolation, demanding labor, summer thunderstorms, frequent flash floods, and floodwaters that covered wagon roads with boulders and plant debris while repeatedly destroying diversion dams and ditches. Within a year, repeated floods on the Fremont River had ruined the family’s irrigation system and washed out their crops, driving them to leave for a more suitable place up-canyon on the higher ground of Fruita, where they became one of the first families to settle.