Archives West Finding Aid

Pearl Sparks was born on a sharecropper farm either in the Mississippi River bottoms near Hannibal, Missouri, or near Kingston, Illinois, (her autobiographies differ) on February 15, 1885. On her 19th birthday she married Clarence Unglesbee at Quincy, Illinois, where her daughters Nell and Pansy and her son Rueben were born. Reuben died in early childhood. During the early years of their marriage, Clarence and Pearl worked on a farm in the Mississippi River bottoms, and worked in factories in Quincy, Illinois. Learning of inexpensive land in the west, the family travelled by train to Montana in 1916, but moved initially to Butte to earn enough money to get a start. In 1918 the Unglesbees settled on a homestead in the Rock Creek area of McCone County. Clarence bought a small store at Bonin in which Pearl worked as postmistress. The store burned down a few years later. Because of the drought conditions in McCone County, the Unglesbees returned to Quincy, Illinois, for brief periods to work for the railroad. After Clarence's death at Quincy in 1927, Pearl returned to the homestead in Montana. She married Perry Scott (Scotty) Danniel in Miles City in November 1929. Scotty supplemented the family's farming income by rounding up wild horses, while Pearl supplemented it by working as a mid-wife, and as a cook for local sheep ranchers. In the mid 1930s construction began on the Fort Peck Dam, and the Danniel's homestead, except for about 40 acres and a cabin, was among those flooded. Embittered by the loss of their homestead, Scotty left, but Pearl stayed on, fighting the Army Corps of Engineers over reimbursement for the land. For several years from around 1938 to 1940 she lived year-round on the homestead with her grandson Alan Amundson. During the winter from 1940 to 1942 Pearl hitch-hiked around Arizona, New Mexico, and other southern states with a friend, Nellie Collins, selling cosmetics. During much of her later life Pearl Danniel lived on what was left of her land in the summer and in the winter stayed in Glasgow or in Miles City with her younger daughter, Nell McCartney. Pearl Danniel began writing essays on life in the Montana Badlands for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the early 1930s and continued to write for the rest of her life. Starting in 1952, she had a regular local news and events column in the Glasgow Courier, the Fairview \ul News, and the Circle \ul Banner , which was called variously "Rock Creek-Bonin News", "Rock Creek News", and "Rock Creek Rumblings". Pearl Danniel conducted a long campaign to get a road built south from the Fort Peck Dam to Brockway. In the 1950s she hitch-hiked to Washington, D.C. hoping to talk with President Eisenhower about the road. The road was finally completed in the early 1970s. Pearl Danniel died June 14, 1975 in Sidney. Pearl's younger brother Albert Leroy (Bert) Sparks was born in 1899. Childhood malnutrition and rickets stunted his growth and caused severe spinal curvature. Pearl and Bert's mother died in 1918 and Pearl took over the task of caring for her brother. He moved west to join her and took up the life of a hobo, cowboy, and horse wrangler, adopting the name "Montana Shorty." He died in Butte on July 21, 1940.