Author: Laura Dorwart / Source: Atlas Obscura
The Salton Sea, southeast California’s vast inland lake with a tumultuous environmental history and a surface nearly 240 feet below the ocean, is a mecca for obsessives. A former tourist destination and resort area, the lake is now beset by the smell of thousands of dead fish and surrounded by a cluster of ghost towns, the kinds of places where you can take up space or disappear.
The salty sea, now the object of many attempts at renewal and revitalization, still draws in folks who are looking for something in its bleak vastness (anarchy, artmaking, something like freedom)—and those who are running from something else.At the end of the 19th century, Captain Charles E. Davis was both. Captain Davis—a moniker he earned at 18 in an Atlantic fishing fleet, and never gave up for the remainder of his life—was no stranger to failures, or to abandoned projects. He tried and failed to pan for gold in Alaska, was an apparently unsuccessful miner in the Klondike, and explored the Caribbean, Siberia, and the Amazon before “retiring” in the Salton Sea.
Born in Massachusetts to a wealthy family, Davis abandoned them for the sea, then the sea for the desert. He found the best (worst?) of both in 1898 in what would become the Salton Sea seven years later. He lost everything to a harrowing flood in Galveston, Texas, in 1900, only to return to his safe haven in California and witness the unholy birth of his future home when the Colorado River flooded the Salton Sink.
There, Davis developed and inhabited Mullet Island, on top of an inactive volcanic butte and among what Salton Sea historian Pat Laflin calls “an inferno of hissing geysers and boiling mud pots.” It was befitting of Davis’ character to live atop a dormant volcano, and that is said to have been one of the site’s major draws for him. The island was named for the alfalfa-fed mullet that Davis raised, which later became famous throughout California. It also became the site of Davis’ passion project, Hell’s Kitchen, a combination boat landing/restaurant/dancehall where boaters and fishers often stopped for good food and a good time. Davis built it alone, along with his own cabin.
In the 1920s, Hell’s Kitchen’s heyday, motorcyclists and adventurers frequently wrote about Hell’s Kitchen’s oddball charms. Describing Mullet Island as “the headquarters of the Salton Sea fishing industry,” one 1922 periodical noted that Hell’s Kitchen was so named because it was “on top of a volcano and may blow off into space any minute.” (The same could be said, perhaps, of Davis.)
A 1920 edition of Popular Mechanics added that area fishermen, seeking to catch the lake’s signature mullet to be sold in San Francisco restaurants, had to sludge through the muddy waters of the Salton Sea underneath canopies, as temperatures regularly climbed to over 125 degrees. But Davis seemed at home there in this cursed corner of the world, setting up shop for over 25 years and serving as the unofficial head of the local fishing industry.
Davis brought his signature spunk,…
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