Virginia City is a real old mining town in the middle of starkly sensuous mountains and breathtaking roller-coaster roads. It's also a shameless tourist trap. Want to see a gold mine? For a price, they show you into the back of a pub. There, a guy who looks like Santa Claus takes you through a door and into a defunct mine tunnel, making semi-ribald jokes all the way. (He asks women visitors if they're having trouble breathing and offers to give them mouth-to-mouth.)

The Red Light Museum promises "Bizarre, queer, and fantastical oddities." There's also a warning: "Not recommended for the weak, feeble, and nervous minded."

Near a bar offering (wink, wink) "weenies" in various sizes, Tommy and I drop our $1 admission fees into an old milk canister and descend to a basement room. It looks to me like a cross between a rummage sale and a Halloween haunted house.

Some of the displays are pretty bizarre. One glass case holds supposedly poisonous arrows, along with a human skull and bones. (This has what to do with the red-light district?) Others are full of opium pipes, ancient condoms and dubious syphilis remedies, along with random pieces of medical equipment.

"Look! Dioramas." Two little nooks off to one side are peopled with mannequins. In keeping with the medical theme, there's an ambiguous doctor's office scene with a woman lying on an examining table. The other room is supposed to be a prostitute's, I guess. The female mannequin, wearing a red teddy, sprawls on a bed, her bare legs apart; the male stands back staring at her. Also staring at her: a fluffy stuffed chimpanzee someone's put next to the bed. It doesn't look like the woman is supposed to have a pet chimp; it's more like this museum is doubling as a storage space for the owner's kids' toys.

Tommy comments, "I can't decide if this is rinky-dink or just...dink."

"Wait a minute. This is interesting." A section of one wall is covered with newspaper items about the saloon and museum's namesake, Julia Bulette. In 1867, Julia was murdered by a robber while she slept. She was 35 years old and working as a prostitute, not in a brothel but in her own house near the center of town. Newspapers called the crime "horrible" and "bloodcurdling." Like other victims of sensational murders, Julia inspired a lot of stories. Tributes all over saloon walls describe her as a Florence Nightingale figure who trudged through the snow at night to nurse the sick -- but also as a fabulous party-thrower whose guests drank only the finest French champagne.

Then there's her photo. It shows a stocky, determined-looking woman in a fire-brigade uniform. She even has a firefighter's hat. She was an honorary member of the brigade, we're told, and they all turned up for her funeral.

I don't get it. Nobody has as many different sides as people credit Julia with. In a store connected to yet another saloon, we buy some historical books and pamphlets. I read them while Tommy drives. "It says here she made up to $1000 a night, usually by sleeping with only one man. How can that be? That would be like -- what? A million now."

"That does sound like a lot of cash. But it was the Gold Rush. I guess there was a lot around. Maybe some gambler gave her a huge tip one night, and that's where the thousand-dollar story came from."

"Seems like it was supply and demand. There weren't many women out there."

But I keep wondering. What set Julia apart from all the other women -- some of them gorgeous, to look at the portraits and mug shots in the books -- who came to the region and burned out, moving from dance-halls and classy houses to less and less tenable situations? Thirty-five may not have been old back then, but most prostitutes were over the hill much younger. Julia definitely looks middle-aged in her picture. And some have claimed that Julia was the only woman on the Comstock for a time, but this turns out to be another bit of legend.

Once I get home, someone suggests I look at the story of Helen Jewett -- also a 19th-century prostitute, also murdered.

If the murder of Julia Bulette was a big sensation, that of Helen Jewett, 30 years earlier, caused an uproar on the scale of the O.J. case -- only more sexually explicit. Jewett, 23 years old, was killed (probably) by a regular client of hers, 19-year-old Richard Robinson. He hacked her with a hatchet and set her on fire, perhaps hoping to burn down the entire brothel where Helen worked, with all the evidence of their affair.

James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, wrote about the body, still lying in bed:

'My God,' exclaimed I, 'how like a statue! I can scarcely conceive that form to be a corpse.' Not a vein was to be seen. The body looked as white -- as full -- as polished as the pure Parian marble. The perfect figure -- the exquisite limbs -- the fine face -- the full arms -- the beautiful bust -- all -- all surpassing in every respect the Venus de Medicis... For a few moments I was lost in admiration at this extraordinary sight -- a beautiful female corpse -- that surpassed the finest statue of antiquity."

People circulated alluring drawings of Helen, dead and alive. One picture of her dead body (like Bennett's description) glossed over the fact that that she had been chopped up and set on fire; it showed her sleeping peacefully, with her breasts, for no clear reason, bared. It was like a kind of macabre death pornography.

It wasn't just her violent death that made Jewett a celebrity; not even the mix of sex and lurid crime. Her personality compelled attention. She was daring enough to go alone to the Wall Street Post office -- considered very much a male province -- to send and pick up mail from her clients. She used letters to seduce them aggressively, but her real passion, at least for Robinson, comes across strongly too.

Patricia Cline Cohen, in her incredibly detailed history of the murder, tell us that Robinson commented of New York prostitutes: "Some of them surpass all other women I have ever known, in beauty; but above all, in eloquence." Helen, who'd had at least the beginnings of an education, invented herself more than once; used several names and told several stories about her past. According to one of her stories, she was seduced as a young teenager by a law student; they read Byron's Don Juan together.

Helen's relationships with her clients were like love affairs, observes Cohen: "They paid her court -- as well as money -- and in return they got friendship, love and sex..." Also, they were very literary relationships. Her lovers gave her books; she discussed literature with them. The relationship with Robinson, especially, had its sordid aspects, with its hints of petty crime by Robinson, and something verging on blackmail on both sides. But even the sordid part of the affair seems a largely deliberate choice by a young woman with a taste for adventure inspired by romantic novels.

Different as Helen Jewett's and Julia Bulette's lives were, they both came to cities that were being flooded with money and business and people -- single people. The excitement of places like that is hard to deny, but it would take a strong-minded person to fully exploit the possibilities. Jewett and Bulette, to judge from what contemporaries thought of them, were strong-minded in this way. They became famous because they were murdered, but they were also remarkable people.

A man named John Millian was hanged for Julia's murder; Mark Twain watched the execution, along with everyone else in Virginia City. The creepy Richard Robinson, who almost certainly killed Helen, got off -- perhaps in backlash against what people were coming to see as an alarming climb in prostitution.

Both women have ended up in museums. Julia possibly got more respect in her own time than she gets now in the dingy little Red Light Museum, where she's celebrated as your stereotypical "hooker with a heart of gold." Never mind if that's partly what she was; they've turned her into a sugarcoated music-hall caricature. As for Helen -- well, Robinson's acquittal was a real slap in the face to her public esteem. Now, her statue -- in an image that recalls her treatment right after the murder -- has pride of place at New York's Museum of Sex, only with her murderer's words (quoted from his letters) constantly being projected over it. Lurid; but with her taste for glamour and danger, she might have even liked it.

The Julia C. Bulette Red Light Museum

"America's Weird Museums" comments: "An interesting museum, but maybe you should leave the kids at the "Bucket of Blood Saloon" down the street..."

The Legend of Julia Bulette and the Red Light Ladies of Nevada, by Douglas Mc Donald (Nevada Publications, Las Vegas, Nevada) "[Julia] was among the best of her class providing men with an element of refinement and kindness unusual at that time in western mining camps. She was a prostitute but also very much a kind woman."

Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West by Anne Seagraves (Wesanne Publications, Hayden, Idaho)

"Several woman enjoyed [prostitution]. It was their chosen way of life...These women were devoted to their work and enjoyed the material benefits and freedom they thought it offered. Unfortunately, their dreams of wealth seldom became reality -- most ended up in the gutter, with a sick, abused body."

But many other women were tricked or forced into prostitution. Perhaps most chilling: a chapter on young Chinese girls brought to America as slaves. This practice lasted until the 1920s.

The Claim: a movie about a 19th-c. Sierra Nevada town, complete with a very sexy bordello.

Julia Bulette became such a legendary figure that there was even a Bonanza episode about her.

The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York by Patricia Cline Cohen

According to Cohen, a well-paid prostitute in the 1830s might earn $1500-2000 a year.

Prostitutes like Jewett lived in fancy brothels and met clients at the theater or through their friends. "In part, the New York newspapers became excited about Helen Jewett's murder because it was so unexpected; prostitutes in the 1830s enjoyed a relatively protected status and the actual chance of winding up murdered was extremely low."

Michel Faber's novel, The Crimson Petal and the White tells the story of Sugar, a 19th-century London prostitute.

The most famous murderer of prostitutes in the 19th century: "Jack the Ripper" -- whoever he was.

Jack The Ripper by Marilyn Bardsley

Casebook: Jack the Ripper

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed by Patricia Cornwell

The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sudgen

"Ripper" fiction:

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

From Hell: The movie, starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham

Aspasia: the prototype of the esteemed, intellectual courtesan

The Helen Jewett exhibit is the best thing at MoSex, says Emily Nussbaum:

On a low platform lay a bright white statue of a naked woman, her arms thrown over her head. She seemed totally anonymous: not that different, really, than any other museum exhibit of a naked woman. A video monitor cascaded mysterious black noodles of words over her body: "Keep quiet until I come on Saturday night -- and then we can see if we cannot be better friends hereafter." Panels explained that this was Helen Jewett, a New York prostitute who was murdered in 1836..."

Other sex museums:

The Hall of Contraception , Toronto

The Icelandic Phallological Museum in Reykjavik is promised a human penis.

The Amsterdam Sex Museum

The official site of the Museu de l' Erótica, Barcelona