Monday, Sept. 27, 1999 | 5:03 a.m.
VIRGINIA CITY, Nev. - It's not your typical Mark Twain - a grisly account of the first public hanging in this old mining town in 1868.
But the long-forgotten dispatch for a Chicago newspaper helps to marry some of the fact and fiction that's surrounded the infamous execution of the man hanged for murdering Julia Bulette, "the prostitute with the heart of gold."
It also sheds some new light on a little-publicized period of Twain's life after he got his start as a newspaperman at the local Territorial Enterprise and before he went on to write some of his greatest works.
"Most the time he is a humorist. This one didn't have much humor," said Guy Rocha, the Nevada state archivist who discovered the papers.
He said it may help explain why the man born Samuel Clemens later spoke out against capital punishment.
"I can see that stiff straight corpse hanging there yet," Twain wrote, "with its black pillow-cased head turned rigidly to one side, and the purple streaks creeping through the hands and driving the fleshy hue of life before them. Ugh!"
Rocha found the article after he learned that a number of newspapers had approached Twain about writing for them upon return from a tour of Europe and the Holy Land that year.
A request to the Library of Congress and the University of California turned up all six stories Twain wrote for the Chicago Republican in 1868.
"Bingo, there it was," Rocha said in an interview. "Nobody had every looked at them closely. The big one was the eyewitness account of the hanging of John Millian, which I believe had not seen the light in 131 years."
A few Twain scholars were aware Twain was in Virginia City at the time of the hanging.
"But virtually no one knew he wrote an eyewitness account and had it published in the Chicago Republican," Rocha said. "This is a page in the chapter of his life."
Most people have never heard of the tale of Bulette and Millian. But in Nevada it is folklore.
Historian Susan James describes Bulette as the "Queen of the Red Lights." Her portrait still hangs in many of the saloons in the National Historic District.
James explained in an 1984 article how Bulette owed a lot to impassioned newspaper stories, dime novels and popular imagination for transforming her from a simple frontier prostitute into the darling of the Comstock.
The Territorial Enterprise once cited her "kind-hearted, liberal, benevolent and charitable disposition." That apparently was based primarily on her contributions to the voluntary fire department, where she was made an honorary member of Virginia City's Engine Company No. 1.
At age 35, Bulette was murdered Jan. 20, 1867, by a man who fled with furs and jewels. Millian was arrested in possession of some of the jewelry but he maintained two men had framed him.
Folklore has it he was strung up by vigilantes, the victim of frontier justice.
But Rocha said in reality the Frenchman was convicted by a district court jury and appealed all the way to the Nevada Supreme Court before he finally went to the gallows April 23, 1868.
Twain doesn't mention Bulette by name in his account, or the fact she was a prostitute. Rocha published the full dispatch in the September-October edition of Nevada Magazine.
"I never had witnessed an execution before and did not believe I could be present at this one without turning away my head at the last moment," Twain wrote.
He went on to explain how that if any anyone deserved to be hanged, it was Millian - a "heartless assassin" who ... knocked her senseless with a billet of wood as she slept and then strangled her with his fingers."
"This is the man I wanted to see hung. ... He strode firmly away and skipped gaily up the steps of the gallows like a happy girl. ...
"I watched him at that sickening moment when the sheriff was fitting the noose about his neck, and pushing the knot this way and that to get it nicely adjusted to the hollow under his ear...
"Down through the hole in the scaffold the strap-bound figure shot like a dart! - a dreadful shiver started at the shoulders, violently convulsed the whole body all the way down and died away with a tense drawing of the toes downward, like a doubled fist - and all was over."
"I saw it all. I took exact note of every detail, even to (Millian's) considerately helping to fix the leather strap that bound his legs together and his quiet removal of his slippers - and I never wish to see it again."
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