George Q. Cannon

George Q. Cannon is one of the LDS leaders who threads through Kyle’s notes on the late-19th-century crisis years of the Church. In Saints — No Unhallowed Hand he is named (with John Taylor and Joseph F. Smith) as a leader who steered the Church through the antipolygamy crusade and the run-up to the Manifesto. The book captures him as an eyewitness diarist of Wilford Woodruff’s deliberations: he was “dumbfounded” and personally unready when Woodruff first spoke plainly in 1889 against performing new plural marriages (“To me, it is an exceedingly grave question … the first time that anything of this kind has ever been uttered, to my knowledge, by one holding the keys”), and his journal records that the Manifesto “has been at President Woodruff’s own instance … he felt perfectly clear in his mind that it was the right thing.” His own journal line — “If God directs a course for me to take, I desire to take it and leave the result with Him” — is one Kyle flags.

In Joseph Smith Lecture 2 — Joseph’s Personality and Character (Truman G. Madsen), Cannon appears twice: footnoted alongside Woodruff on “the flood of intelligence the Saints could not bear” (“his knowledge was so extensive … they could not rise to it”), and as the English convert George Cannon who applied the death masks to Joseph Smith and Hyrum after the Carthage assassination — masks later used to make authentic busts.

Context: George Q. Cannon (1827–1901) was a British-born apostle, editor, and long-serving counselor in the First Presidency under Taylor, Woodruff, and Lorenzo Snow, and a central figure in Church administration during the polygamy-crusade era.

Where this appears

• Saints — No Unhallowed Hand — named among the leaders through the antipolygamy crisis; quoted from his journal on Woodruff’s 1889 turn and on the Manifesto’s origin.
• Joseph Smith Lecture 2 — Joseph’s Personality and Character — footnoted on the “flood of intelligence” the Saints couldn’t bear; identified as the convert who made Joseph and Hyrum’s death masks.