twain’s buffalo illustrator

John Harrison Mills: Twain’s Usung Buffalo Express Illustrator

On the afternoon of August 30, 1862, the soldiers of the Twenty-First Regiment from Buffalo, New York, charged out of the Virginia woods with bayonets fixed toward a Confederate enemy securely entrenched behind a railroad embankment in the Second Battle of Bull Run. Amid the hellish smoke-filled scene, bullets whistling by and deafening cannon fire roaring in his ears, 20-year-old private John Harrison Mills saw the color bearer fall beside him and then witnessed two other comrades who took turns raising the flag shot dead. Private Mills continued his advance, clambered over a rail fence, and headed with his troop for a ditch, where hand-to-hand combat was under way.

He never got there.

A .58 caliber bullet from a Confederate musket ripped into his groin, spiraling up his pelvis, a blow that seemed to tear him in two, as he later wrote.1 Little did he know that seven years later, he would be illustrating newspaper stories for America’s most famous humorist, Mark Twain.

John Harrison Mills was born in 1842 on the family farm in Bowmansville, New York, just 13 miles east of Buffalo. At the age of 15, he moved to Buffalo as an apprentice to bank note engraver John P. Jamison and also learned sculpting under stone carver William Lautz and painting from famed Buffalo artist Laurentius “Lars” Gustaf Sellstedt in his Kremlin Hall studio. One of Mills’ first works was a portrait of his father, Aaron, in 1859.2

Three days after Confederate forces opened fire on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861, Mills, 19, was one of the first 100 men to enlist at Buffalo’s Court House in the Twenty-First Regiment of New…

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