Isaac Bluxome

 

Isaac Bluxome, deceased at his home, No. 1422 Hyde street, November 9, 1890, was among the pioneers of 1849, and was also a noted man in San Francisco’s early history.  He was born in New York city in 1829.  His father was an Englishman of good family, and his mother was a daughter of Colonel John De Camp, aid de-camp to General Washington in the Revolutionary war.  Mr. Bluxome was educated in a school at Flushing, Long Island, conducted by a clergyman, where he remained to the age of sixteen years.  He was then placed by his father in the hardware business, where he remained until January, 1849, in which year he started for California in the bark Madonna, arriving in San Francisco in June of the year.  Within a month of his arrival he began a business career as a general merchant, but was burned out with hundreds of others in the great fire of 1850.  He resumed business again as soon as his fortune would permit.  When he arrived in this city it was under the reign of terror on account of  “The Hounds,” an organization of thieves and ruffians, to whose band it is said many young men whose families in the East were respectable had been attracted.  Mr. Bluxome took a prominent part in ridding this city of this dangerous element, being one of the Citizens’ Band of Safety of 1849 and 1851.  He took the lead in founding a citizen soldiery, and was also the founder of the California National Guard.  As “No. 33,” however, Isaac Bluxome’s name is best known to those citizens who know of the early days of this city only through history.  The cause that led to the creation of the Committee of Safety of 1856, better known as the Vigilance Committee, was principally the fact that citizens owning property were unable to protect their interest without such an effort.  Criminals and ballot-box stuffers had made it impossible to have an honest election, and the courts were more than suspected in many instances of favoring the criminals at the expense of justice.  Everything was done with a secrecy that the people against whom the committee work was directed speedily learned to dread.  The publication of the committee, its notices and advertisements of meeting were signed always “33, Secretary.”  The orders were signed in the same way, and the mysterious individuals whom the number represented was one whom the criminal element swore to kill.  Undoubted Mr. Bluxome would have been killed had the fact been known that he was the man.

 

For some years after giving up the mercantile business, he was a coal and iron broker in San Francisco.  Later he was for many years engaged in general mining in Amador county until the passage of the anti-hydraulic mining laws, since which he was engaged in no active business.

 

Mr. Bluxome was married in 1864, to Miss Gertrude T., daughter of Miers F. Truitt, an early settler of California, who was a prominent mining man on this coast up to his death.  Mrs. Bluxome is a grandniece of General Henry Dodge, the hero of the war of 1812, and subsequently Governor of Wisconsin, and also United States Senator from that State.  Mr. and Mrs. Bluxome have nine children who are living.