<p>We'd like to start our bug numbers to something other than 1 for a new Bugzilla installation.  Is there a way to do this?</p>

I'm not sure about Bugzilla's backend, but if it uses a SQL database, you should be able to find the table that controls the bug ID number and set the autoincrement value to something else. That is, if Bugzilla uses autoincrement.
But I don't have a copy of Bugzilla to provide more info.