The Pequot War was an armed conflict between the Pequot tribe and an alliance of the English colonists of the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Saybrook colonies and their Native American allies (the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes) which occurred between 1634 and 1638. The Pequots lost the war. At the end, about seven hundred Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity. Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery to the West Indies. Other survivors were dispersed. The result was the elimination of the Pequot as a viable polity in what is present-day Southern New England.

It would take the Pequot more than three and a half centuries to regain political and economic power in their traditional homeland along the Pequot (present-day Thames) and Mystic rivers in what is now southeastern Connecticut.

Etymology

The name Pequot is a Mohegan term, the meaning of which is in dispute among Algonquian-language specialists. Most recent sources in claiming that "Pequot" comes from Paquatauoq, (the destroyers), rely on the speculations of an early 20th-century authority on Algonquian languages, Frank Speck; an anthropologist and specialist of Pequot-Mohegan in the 1920s-1930s. He had doubts about this etymology, believing that another term, after translation relating to the "shallowness of a body of water", seemed more plausible.