The most numerous people of sixteenth-century Sonora — irrigating maize in the river valleys of the Sierra Madre's western foothills from a chain of small, fiercely independent town-polities that Coronado's men mistook for kingdoms.
Not an ending: congregated into Jesuit mission towns from 1614 and long allied to Spain against the Apache, the Opata were absorbed into Sonoran town society; the language is effectively gone but people in the old Opatería still identify as Opata.
The one modern book devoted to the Opata, their territory and their disappearance from the record.
The standard reconstruction of contact-era populations of Sonora and Sinaloa, including the Opata collapse.