Born to Mormon pioneer parents, Frederick Edmond Samuel Danner and Olive Matilda Lewis, Samuel is their sixth child of thirteen. Born before him is Harriett Celecta, Marshall, Olive Matilda, David, and Frederick. Born after him is Edna May, John Gibson, Heber Harry, Agnes, Franklin Pierce, Abbie Elizabeth, and Jefferson Lee. After all their children were born in Albion, Idaho, the parents and many of their children moved to California.

From information found on Samuel's memory page on familysearch.org:
Samuel enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, February 14, 1918 and did his boot training at Mare Island in California. He was sent to France very soon after and was wounded in battle. He was in the 5th Marine Regiment, Company 66, 2nd Division. He was sent back to Newark, New Jersey for medical and hospital care. Sam's left shoulder had been badly shot away. Many bone grafts were made but the shoulder could never be replaced and the bone grafts proved useless. He was in the hospital in New York for over a year. The joint being gone, the arm healed up but dangled at his side. He became very adapt in his use of the arm so that in later years few people ever knew he had been wounded.

Sam married Jessie Firth August 2, 1927 in Firth, Idaho. They lived in Rosemede, California for about 10 years before moving to the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho for a short time. They then moved to Shoshone, Idaho.

From a newspaper article in June 1949: In Shoshone, Sam became a farming pioneer. In 1937, on land that had never been farmed before, about 12 miles northwest of Shoshone, they established their ranch. At first they lived in a makeshift shelter built from railroad boxcar doors and pieces of canvas. Sam cleared the land of rocks and the sagebrush. He leveled the land for irrigation and soon was producing bumper crops of alfalfa and building his herds of beef and dairy cattle. He installed windbreaks on the farm and improved pasture mixtures and irrigation systems. He was selected as a leading conservation farmer in Lincoln county in 1949. Sam also served with the soil conservation district, the cattlemen's association, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.