His father's sister, Leonora Cannon, had married future Latter Day Saint apostle John Taylor and was baptized in 1836.

In 1842, the Cannon family set sail for the United States to join with the church in Nauvoo, Illinois.

Cannon worked in the printing office of the Times and Seasons and the Nauvoo Neighbor for Taylor, who was an editor of both periodicals.

After doing this for several months Cannon and several other mining missionaries were asked to head to the Kingdom of Hawaii, where he served for four years.

Joseph F. Smith, a future church president, would follow Cannon and serve in Hawaii one year later.

During this time, Cannon served as printer of the Deseret News while it was publishing in exile in Fillmore, Utah.

Cannon's mission in Europe ended when he was recalled by Young in 1862 to work in Washington, D.C., to assist in the church's promotion of Utah Territory's bid for statehood.

In this capacity, Cannon was the editor of the Millennial Star and, for a short time, the church's Welsh-language periodical, Udgorn Seion.

In 1866, Cannon began publication of a magazine for youth and young adult Latter-day Saints called The Juvenile Instructor.

He remained a congressional delegate until 1882, when his seat was declared vacant by the enactment of the Edmunds Act, which terminated many political and civil rights for Utah's Mormon polygamists.

The newly appointed anti-Mormon[6] territorial governor, Eli Houston Murray, openly supported the Liberal Party, which generally opposed church candidates.

The 1880 territory-wide election for a congressional delegate brought the Liberal Party unexpectedly close to sending a representative to Washington, DC.

The protest listed a dozen claims, chiefly that Cannon, born in England, was not a naturalized citizen but an alien.

The protest also claimed that Cannon's participation in polygamy was incompatible with federal law and a delegate's oath of office.

The issue brought unfavorable national attention to Utah, which contributed to the Edmunds Act being signed into law on March 23, 1882.

When the Supreme Court upheld the ban on plural marriage in the 1879 Reynolds v. United States decision, Cannon stated: Our crime has been: We married women instead of seducing them; we reared children instead of destroying them; we desired to exclude from the land prostitution, bastardy and infanticide.

... Let it be published to the four corners of the earth that in this land of liberty, the most blessed and glorious upon which the sun shines, the law is swiftly invoked to punish religion, but justice goes limping and blindfolded in pursuit of crime.

In September 1888, Cannon surrendered himself and pleaded guilty at trial to charges of unlawful cohabitation under the Edmunds Act.

[9] In the string of events preceding the announcement of Wilford Woodruff in September, 1890 that the church would not sanction additional polygamist marriages, Cannon's son Frank shuttled communications relating to polygamy between the US Congress and his father.

Had he lived a few months longer, he would have become the President of the LDS Church: Lorenzo Snow died on October 10 of that year.