Colusa County Biographies

Michael Billiou

This file is part of the California Genealogy & History Archives http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cagha/index.htm



            Michael Billiou  is a native of St. Louis County, Missouri, born 
September 7, 1832.  His father had settled in this region previous to the 
cession of the country west of the Mississippi to the United States.  Michael 
lived on his father�s farm till he was twenty years of age and then set out for 
California.  He arrived in Colusa County in the fall of 1852, without a dollar 
in his pocket, offering to work for his board, yet for a time failed to find 
employment.  He was finally hired by Richard J. Walsh, to work on the Capay 
grant, where he was steadily occupied for ten years.  With the sum of money 
accumulated in these years of diligent toil, Mr. Billiou purchased the property 
on which he now resides, consisting of seven hundred and fifty acres of land on 
Stony Creek.  Here he farms, raises stock and grows fruits.  He is much 
interested in fruit culture.  Twenty-five orange trees which were at first 
planted as ornaments in his garden have grown thrifty and produce abundantly, 
while in his orchard is a variety of all kinds of fruits.  His vineyard, 
likewise, shows what care and judgment can accomplish.  His residence, which was 
built in 1878, is a large and handsome structure, and, standing on a chosen 
spot, surrounded by orange and other fruit trees, it is as welcome to the eye of 
the traveler as the heart and habits of its owner are hospitable.
            Mr. Billiou never married, but his domestic affairs are 
superintended by his mother and his sister Mary.  His aged mother was, before 
marriage, Mary O�Connell, born February 12, 1813, in St. Louis County, Missouri, 
within twelve miles of the old court-house, an historic spot for thousands who 
pushed the line of settlement northward into the prairie States of the middle 
West.  Mr. Billiou�s early residence on his place was not without its 
adventures.  He recalls the devastations among stock committed by bears over 
thirty years ago.  In 1854 he caught a grizzly in a trap a few hundred yards 
from the Walsh residence.  He shot it and it weighed nine hundred pounds.  He 
caught the monster in a trap that weighed seventy-five pounds.  Though the trap 
was fastened to a heavy oak log, his bear-ship dragged the log, trap and all 
some distance till they got tangled in the brush.
            Since making his home here, Mr. Billiou made one trip East, in 1876, 
to his former home, in St. Louis, and also visited the Centennial Exhibition at 
Philadelphia.
 
�Colusa County� � by Justus H. Rogers � Orland, CA � 1891 � pp 376-377