Couts had arrived in California in June 1849 with the United States Boundary Commission, which had come to San Diego to survey the newly established international border between the United States and Mexico — a consequence of the Mexican-American War that had ended barely a year before. The boundary survey was the official mission. But the Southern Emigrant Trail ran through the same territory the commission was mapping, and the trail was carrying thousands of people who had heard about California gold and had chosen the southern desert route over the mountain crossings to the north. The Commission's presence in the region positioned Couts to respond when the humanitarian situation became impossible to ignore.

From September 23 through December 1, 1849 — seventy days — Camp Salvation functioned as what its name promised: a place where the desperate could recover before attempting the final push into California, or be turned back from conditions that would kill them. Couts organized food distribution, medical assistance, and the basic organizational structure that prevented a chaotic situation from becoming a catastrophic one. The camp operated at the western edge of the desert crossing, the last obstacle before California's coastal valleys. Emigrants who reached it had survived the hardest part of the journey; those who hadn't could go no further.

Lieutenant Cave Johnson Couts was born November 11, 1821, in Springfield, Tennessee, and educated partly through the influence of his uncle Cave Johnson, who served as a U.S. Congressman and Postmaster General. The younger Couts entered West Point at seventeen, graduating in 1843 as a second lieutenant. His military career took him through posts in Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California before the boundary commission assignment. He had been elected a state delegate from San Diego to attend California's Constitutional Convention at Monterey in August 1849 — making him simultaneously a military officer, a boundary commissioner, and a participant in California's foundational governmental moment, all while running a refugee camp at the desert's edge.

Couts resigned his Army commission in October 1851 and settled into California life. He married Ysidora Bandini, daughter of Don Juan Bandini, in April 1851, connecting him to one of California's prominent Mexican families. He built an agricultural empire at Rancho Guajome near Vista — 2,219 acres that he expanded to nearly 20,000 at its peak, pioneering commercial orchards in San Diego County. He became a County Judge and briefly served as a special Indian agent. He died July 10, 1874, at the Horton's House hotel in San Diego. His ranch home, Rancho Guajome Adobe, now a California Historical Landmark, survives as a record of what he built after his desert relief operation.

In 1965, the California State Park Commission, working with the City of Calexico and the John P. Squibob chapter of E Clampus Vitus, dedicated California Historical Landmark #808 at the 400 block of East 5th Street in Calexico. The marker's text is precise about what happened there: a refugee center for distressed emigrants attempting to reach the gold fields over the Southern Emigrant Trail. The site itself has long since been absorbed into the urban fabric of Calexico — no physical trace of the 1849 camp survives above ground. The landmark preserves the memory of seventy days in which a military officer's decision to act prevented an unknown number of deaths at the edge of the Sonoran Desert.