The Salton Sea has long attracted people drawn to its strange landscape, but few embraced its isolation quite like Captain Charles E. Davis. Born into a wealthy Massachusetts family, Davis left home for a life at sea and earned the title “captain” by the age of 18. His adventures eventually brought him to California, where he settled on a volcanic butte that became Mullet Island after the Colorado River flooded the Salton Sink. There, he built a cabin and created Hell’s Kitchen, an unusual cafe, dance hall and boat landing surrounded by boiling mud pots and extreme desert heat. Davis spent more than two decades making the remote site his home and playground. He sold alfalfa-fed mullet, hosted dances, sang sea shanties and pursued a string of eccentric schemes. Yet his strangest obsession came later, when he became fascinated by the doomed Donner Party and set out to retrace its historic journey. What followed turned Davis from an eccentric desert settler into an unlikely chronicler of one of the most notorious journeys in American pioneer history.
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