Bayagoula

The Bayagoula, whose name John Swanton translated as bayou people, were a small tribe of the lower Mississippi, their main village near Bayou Goula in Iberville Parish; their unrecorded language may have been a Southern Muskogean tongue akin to Choctaw and Houma.

In 1699 they were among the first Louisiana peoples to meet the French explorer Iberville, sharing their village with the related Mugulasha. Early alliances shifted violently: the Houma raided them in 1699, and in 1700 the Bayagoula fell on their Mugulasha hosts and destroyed them.

Disaster came in 1706, when first Taensa refugees and then the Tunica attacked them, the Tunica ambush nearly wiping them out. Perhaps forty warriors remained by 1715, smallpox thinned them further by 1721, and the last Bayagoula settled among the Houma and Acolapissa or married into the French, Spanish and German colonies, disappearing as a separate people before the mid-eighteenth century.