Guaicura

The Guaycura were nomadic hunter-gatherers of the southern Baja California peninsula, from near Loreto south to Todos Santos, disputing La Paz bay with the Pericú. Their language had no demonstrable link to any other Native American tongue, suggesting their ancestors' isolation at the peninsula's tip for at least five thousand years; they were earlier pushed south by the expanding Cochimí.

Without agriculture, pottery or tribal government, they roved in independent bands of a few hundred, hunting mule deer and bighorn sheep, taking turtles on the shore and roasting agave hearts in stone-heated pits.

Jesuits founded missions there in the eighteenth century, and Johann Jakob Baegert left a full account from San Luis Gonzaga between 1751 and 1768. Perhaps five thousand strong at contact, they were devastated by introduced diseases; by about 1800 their culture had disappeared, survivors merging into colonial mestizos.