George Henry Cannon was born to Pearl and Mary (Fuller) Cannon in Day, New York on December 30, 1826. He was one of eleven children. In 1833, the large family joined the vast wave of westward American migration, taking up residence in the town of Saline in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Four years later, the Cannons relocated to the small settlement of Bruce in Macomb County. Young George received a hard-won education in the rural schools, working for his teachers in exchange for tuition and for local families to compensate for his board.

In the early spring of 1846, nineteen-year-old Cannon signed on with the American Exploring Company to participate in a survey of the Lake Superior mineral region. Reports of abundant copper resources had sparked a frenetic rush to establish mines in the region just three years earlier, but the lackluster returns of most early endeavors had left would-be investors skeptical of the Upper Peninsula’s mineralogical potential. The American Exploring Company--armed with abundant capital from the East Coast and outfitted with a charter from the state legislature of Vermont--proposed to resolve the uncertainty with a more extensive exploration of the region. More than sixty men set out under the company’s auspices, dividing into seven teams of engineers, woodsmen, and adventurous but inexperienced youth like Cannon. As a member of the expedition, Cannon extensively traveled the shores of Lake Superior, visiting Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands and various areas of the Upper Peninsula, including the Keweenaw Peninsula, the Porcupine Mountains, Pictured Rocks, and Sault Ste. Marie.

Upon his return to the Lower Peninsula in 1847, Cannon furthered his education at an advanced academy in Rochester, Michigan. He subsequently taught school in Oakland and Macomb counties before being hired by Judge W.A. Burt to conduct additional surveys in 1849. Following his successful work in the Saginaw region, Cannon was named a United States Deputy Surveyor in August 1850; his career through the mid-1850s took him to the Grand Traverse Bay, Cheboygan, and across the Upper Peninsula, where he completed the mineralogical survey interrupted by the death of Douglass Houghton. After the government discontinued public surveys in 1857, Cannon returned to Macomb County and engaged in selection and analysis of pine and farming lands in Michigan and Wisconsin.

In 1852, Cannon married Lucy Marie Cole, also a native of New York. The couple had six children, three of whom died in childhood. Of their surviving children, Howard Burt Cannon (b. 1868), married May Varney in 1892. Some of Howard and May's descendants are represented in this collection, including their son, Guy Henry Cannon (b. 1897) and his wife, Carrie Alta Bullock, as well as Guy and Carrie's daughter, Leah Cannon Atwater, and their son, Glen, and his wife, Linda.

George H. Cannon died in Shelby Township near Detroit on December 11, 1909 at the age of eighty-two.