Researcher's Guide to Sutter's Fort's Collections of Donner Party ...

The Charles E. Davis Overland Trail
Project Photographs
This collection of photographs documents Charles E. Davis’ efforts in 1927 trace
the Donner Party’s route from Independence, Missouri to Sacramento, California. Davis,
an amateur historian in his later years, was born into a wealthy Massachusetts family, but
as a young man signed on as an ordinary seaman with an Atlantic fishing fleet. By the
time he was eighteen, he had won the rating of captain, a title he kept until his death in
1933. In 1898 he joined the Alaska gold stampede and traveled to the Klondike, though
he apparently was no great success as a miner. Afterwards he spent time as an naturalist
and explorer, collecting specimens and guiding explorations throughout the world. He
had fished from Alaska to the Caribbean, explored unknown regions of Siberia, traveled
up the Amazon, collected 3000 specimens of sea life, captured elephant seals, and spent
several years exploring the desert trails of America’s Southwest. At the time of the
Overland Trail project, Davis was retired and living on Mullet Island on the Salton Sea
about ten miles northwest of Calipatria, California. Sutter’s Fort Curator Harry Peterson
described him as a “peculiarly shy individual…adverse to contact with the public [and]
more at home in the wilderness.”
Davis spent his own money and time recreating the Donner Party’s route from
Independence Missouri to Sacramento, California believing that Sutter’s Fort and the
people who traveled there on the overland trails represented the indomitable spirit of
pioneer better than anything else in the world. He recorded his expedition in a journal
through regular correspondence with Harry C. Peterson, the curator at the Fort. This
collection’s photographs, which number more than a thousand, may be of particular
interest to researchers interested in the Interstate Highway system and the development
modern roadways in the western states. Davis’ photos show much of the western trails
they appeared before the highways and the resulting communities covered them over.
The index on the following pages contains Davis’ descriptions of each of the 1087 photos
in this collection, transcribed from the index cards on which he recorded them.
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