Julia Bulette, a prostitute who was murdered in her bed in 1867, remains a celebrity in Virginia City.
Her image peers from posters, book covers and souvenir tchotchkes displayed in shop windows along C Street. Her visage adorns saloon walls and old postcards. In Virginia City, a plaque affixed to a stone column memorializes her. The monument overlooks the hollow where her killer, John Millain, swung from the gallows on April 24, 1868.
In the 20th century, books, movies and television shows promoted Bulette as the “The Queen of the Comstock.” Legend says she was the madam of an upscale brothel called “The Palace” and navigated the streets of the mining town in a gold-trimmed coach. The black-lacquered carriage had a coat of arms, featuring four aces and a resting lion, on its door. However, modern historians have debunked much of her legend, so what more is there to say?
“My first thought was that nobody needs another book about Julia Bulette; it’s been done to death,” said Robin Flinchum, whose first book, Red Light Women of Death Valley, published in 2015, piqued her curiosity about Bulette’s case. “But there were a lot of unanswered questions, like people kept alluding to the fact that John Millain had killed women before Bulette. I wondered who those other women were. Why doesn’t anybody write about that?”
After a decade of research, Flinchum’s latest book, The Redemption of Julia Bulette: Murder, Myth and the Hunt for a Serial Killer in Early Virginia City, rolled off the presses this year. The true-crime story is a window into the daily life of the people of the Comstock, the sex workers who plied their trade there, early forensic policing, Western journalism and the system of frontier justice. She dug up facts about four other murders in San Francisco possibly linked to Millain.
Bulette wasn’t a wealthy madam who lived an opulent lifestyle, Flinchum said, nor was she among the impoverished women who worked out of flimsy, streetside stalls, flaunting their nakedness as miners walked by. She had some measure of wealth in the earlier days of the mining camp but was recovering from an illness and living in a cottage owned by a friend when she was murdered. Bulette was an honorary member of a volunteer fire company and had a reputation of being charitable.
Her murder made headlines and spurred public outrage in a town where casual violence was commonplace. Millain’s trial attracted the attention of newspapers around the West. Mark Twain, then working in San Francisco, returned to Virginia City to cover Millain’s hanging. Flinchum relied on such newspaper accounts of the time, diaries written as events unfolded, and probate files created when Bulette’s estate was settled.
At the time of her death, Bulette still had jewelry and other possessions accumulated prior to her illness, but the value of those items did not cover her debts. After Millain’s execution, her case was remembered in Virginia City, and author George Lyman added many embellishments in his 1934 The Saga of the Comstock Lode. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when newspaper owner Lucius Beebe expanded on Bulette’s “Queen of the Comstock” image, that the myth gained a much wider audience.
In 1959, the first season of the Bonanza TV seriesdevoted an episode to Bulette. The sex worker is portrayed as a saloon owner/madam who becomes the star-crossed love interest of Little Joe Cartwright. The episode, which casts 1940s femme fatale Jane Greer as Bulette, is available for free on YouTube.
“Every couple of decades, something would come along and revive interest in Julia Bulette,” said Flinchum, an award-winning journalist. “Having her appear on Bonanza was huge, and that reignited interest in Virginia City, which was already trading on its past and its colorful characters. Bonanza brought a whole new tourism boom to Virginia City.”
The great fire of 1875 destroyed the buildings where Bulette lived and worked, as well as public records that may have shed more light on the woman and her murder. Even so, Flinchum used all available sources to weave a compelling tale of the early Comstock and unravel some of the mysteries surrounding Bulette’s life and her murder.
“I hope people will come away from this book with the sense that Julia Bulette was a real person—that she was a living, breathing human being, just getting along in the world the same as everyone else,” she said.
“She and the four other women (murdered in San Francisco between 1856 and 1864) were real. … Julia didn’t live in some sort of Hollywood glamour. She lived and breathed and had hopes and dreams like any other person. She and the other women were not just cardboard cutouts.
Robin Flinchum will be doing book talks and signings in Northern Nevada this fall, including one at 8 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 1, at the Gold Hill Hotel, at 1540 S Main St., in Virginia City; noon to 2 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 3, at Barnes and Noble, 5555 S Virginia St., in Reno; and 6 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 14, at Knights of Pythias Lodge, 980 Nevada St., in Reno, sponsored by the Nevada Historical Society.
If you’re traveling to other Nevada locales this summer, you can catch Flinchum at the Manhattan Public Library in the Nye County town of Manhattan from 3:30 to 5 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 15; and 11 a.m., Monday, Aug. 24, at the Clark County Museum, at 1830 S. Boulder Highway, in Henderson.
Here is an excerpt from The Redemption of Julia Bulette: Murder, Myth and the Hunt for a Serial Killer in Early Virginia City.
PROLOGUE
February 28, 1864
Prostitution flourished, as in all large camps, and courtesans promenaded the streets slowly, decked out in gay dresses and showy jewelry, and drifting about with the restless tide which set to and fro through the city. … [There] was [a] distinctive quarter, marked out by law for [them]—two rows of white cabins with gaudily furnished rooms, at whose uncurtained windows the inmates sat, spider like, waiting for flies. —Eliot Lord, Comstock Mining and Miners, 1881
It was a little after midnight when the door of the National Lager Beer Saloon on North C Street opened and a drunken woman, in a flurry of calico and a flash of diamonds, was launched onto the sidewalk. The hooped skirt of her dress wobbled as she staggered off the hammered boards and into the street, cursing and stirring up dust.
The air was cold and crisp, the unpaved roads unusually dry for a winter night in Virginia City. A steady stream of humanity poured north and south along C and B Streets. Even at this late hour, freight wagons clogged traffic in the narrow thoroughfare. Workers shuffled along the sidewalks on their way home from a night shift at the mines or in the stamp mills that hissed and banged on the mountainside below town. Passengers who had just arrived on the midnight stage scurried toward the warmth of home or the shelter of a hotel or saloon.
Virginia City was young and prosperous, recklessly so. The sole reason for its existence was a lode of silver ore a mile and a half long that ran underneath the streets and dwellings of the four-year-old city. This formation, threaded through and around with smaller veins of silver and gold, was called the Comstock Lode and had already lured thousands of fortune-seeking hopefuls partway up the side of a mountain that reached nearly eight thousand feet into the sky. There, the lode spawned a slanted, staggered city that clung to the slope like a band of barnacles and grew so fast its shanties and mansions alike multiplied almost overnight. The little city spread out across the inhospitable sagebrush while the rich ore below it lay the tracks for a whirling, tilting carnival ride of mad wealth, wild speculation, and sometimes perilous ruin.
Up on that high desert mountain, in the wilds of an isolated territory still fighting for statehood, Virginia City inspired pride in most of its citizens. They could and did brag of their part in establishing a hub of technological innovation, a bastion of forward-thinking culture, and a bustling new metropolis. From the Comstock came a system of underground timber shoring and innovations in machinery that revolutionized nineteenth century mining, as well as the silver and gold that helped earn Nevada its statehood. From the Comstock came not only the sagebrush journalists, making literary names for themselves all over the West, but also men so rich they could buy themselves a place in history.
But the woman on the boardwalk that night, a notorious prostitute called Buffalo Jo, had her own opinion of Virginia City and its citizenry and shared it freely as she barreled down the narrow, crowded street, bellowing obscenities. It had become something of a habit with Josephine Dodge to spend her evenings brawling and being ejected from the classier drink emporiums on C Street. She always came in like a lamb, carefully ornamented with flashy rings and necklaces, dressed in bright silk or colorful calico. But all the finery in the world couldn’t mask her true nature, and as soon as she’d had a drink or two, she became sloppy and belligerent.
The police would come along and take charge of her eventually. Sometimes they would find her fallen down drunk in a heap of lace and ruffles on the sidewalk, sometimes kicking and punching, sometimes shooting her pistol wildly in the air from the back of a horse. An officer would wrestle her or carry her away down to the dank, stinking jail underneath the opera house on E Street. There, if she hadn’t drunk enough to knock her out, she’d keep everyone awake all night with her cursing and muttering.
But as yet, no officer had appeared. Up ahead, Tom Peasley’s brightly lit Sazerac Saloon spilled piano music into the street. Buffalo Jo had already been ejected from the Sazerac at least once and seemed to have an especial grudge against the fellows who met there. It was a gathering place for the literati and the cognoscenti, where newspapermen, poets, and playwrights, including a young reporter named Samuel Clemens, collected for sustenance of both the body and the intellect …
(Howard) James of the (Virginia City) Bulletin saw an opportunity to rally his readers in their efforts to clean up the city by dogging Buffalo Jo and reporting her every erratic footstep. So, on that crisp, cold night, she might have been on her way to have it out with James. Or perhaps any newsman would do, since several of the other papers had begun running items about her, too. If that was her goal, however, it would have to wait, for she’d already embroiled herself in another quarrel.
A tall, dark-haired man came out of the National almost at her heels. Out in the street, he caught up with her and appeared to take up some argument that had begun before she left the saloon. Then he smacked her so hard she fell down in the dirt, the arc of her hoops rolling upward to frame the tussled pantalets underneath. The man cursed her, and she cried out, not her usual screeching but a pitiful moan that caught the attention of a soldier passing along the street. Alarmed at the sound of a woman in distress, the soldier shouted at the man to stop, drew his revolver, and fired off a warning shot.
The assailant jerked away from Buffalo Jo. The soldier, pressing his advantage, fired another shot into the air. The assailant shied back, turned, and ran into the shadows, quickly blending into the night.
He fled up the steep incline of Union Street and then south along B, keeping to the shadows, his trousers and rough coat blending into the darkness. He wore simple workingman’s clothes. His was a life lived close to the bone, indistinguishable from so many other immigrants who drifted in and out of the American mining camps hoping to claim a little wealth for their own. He did not comb the hills looking for a prospect that others might have missed, nor did he lower himself into the hellish holes and labor to keep the mines bleeding silver for other men. He drove a laundry wagon, as he had driven a water wagon in San Francisco, delivering the basic necessities around town. Sometimes he did odd jobs but quickly spent what he earned in drink and dissipation. He had neither family nor close friends and an unfortunate tendency to despise the only women likely to treat him well or welcome his company.
The Bulletin detailed Josephine’s exploits of the night before and, alongside them, another cautionary tale about a terrible murder in San Francisco. A woman living there, who was once a member of the Virginia City demimonde, had packed her trunks and was waiting for transport to return to Nevada. Instead, a deliveryman found her on the floor of her little cottage, her throat cut from ear to ear.
Up ahead he saw the light of Madame Fisher’s cigar shop and ducked in the doorway, where the sweet scent of Havana tobacco perfumed the narrow space. “Madame,” he greeted the sharp-eyed woman standing among the wooden display boxes and humidors. He knew her only by sight, having passed her shop many times. She was a French expatriate like himself, widow of an American, and he thought he might gain her sympathy. He came forward, filling the space with his wide shoulders and rangy arms.
He began speaking in rapid, agitated French. “The police will be coming for me,” he said. “I had a fuss with that terrible woman, that Buffalo Jo.”
Madame might have turned up her nose at the mention of the notorious whore, but she could not afford to be too particular.
“Might you hold some money for me?” he asked, digging into a pocket and producing a clean handkerchief knotted around a jangle of gold coins. “Forty dollars,” he said. “Might you keep it for me?”
“Why do you not keep it yourself?” she asked.
“The policemen will steal it from me. I am not going to the calaboose only so that they can steal my money.”
Given the number of scandals that had plagued the burgeoning Virginia City police department, Madame must have understood that the policemen could be as weak, perhaps even weaker, than other men, for she agreed.
The big, tall man, whose name she did not then even know, handed over the weighted handkerchief. “I will be back tomorrow,” he said, “if I am free.” And then he fled.
In the morning, the unfortunate soldier, who had been arrested for firing his sidearm on a city street in his effort to defend Josephine Dodge, was turned loose with a warning. The Bulletin detailed Josephine’s exploits of the night before and, alongside them, another cautionary tale about a terrible murder in San Francisco. A woman living there, who was once a member of the Virginia City demimonde, had packed her trunks and was waiting for transport to return to Nevada. Instead, a deliveryman found her on the floor of her little cottage, her throat cut from ear to ear. It was a vicious and bloody crime, and the police had no idea who’d done it. In an effort to utilize emerging technology in the work of solving crimes, the city coroner suggested they try optography, which involved cutting out the dead woman’s eyes. He tried to find within the depths of her lifeless retinas the frozen image of the last face she saw.
Some who examined the resultant photographs claimed they could make out a tall, dark man with a mustache. Others said it was bunk and there was nothing on the plates but static and blur. With this experiment yielding nothing of use, the San Francisco police turned to Virginia City and asked for help in finding a person of interest in the case. The victim had recently married, and her new husband, they believed, was currently living somewhere on the Comstock.
As for Jo’s attacker, the police had not been inclined to pursue him, for he certainly wasn’t the first man who had wanted to knock the devil out of Buffalo Jo. He was, the police seemed to think at the time, the least of their worries.
The tall, dark, mustachioed Frenchman did go back to Madame Fisher’s for his gold the next day and after that returned to her shop now and then to buy tobacco. She had earned his loyalty, and as a businesswoman she was grateful, but any familiarity ended there. She saw him sometimes driving the wagon for Alexi’s French Laundry and later for the Pioneer Laundry, but she did not say hello.
If she thought of him at all, it was simply as the big washman. Several years would pass before she, along with everyone else in Virginia City, learned his name.