The Pequot dominated a large part of Connecticut (considering how small Connecticut is, that was no achievement) being overlords of many other small tribes.
One cause of tension between the Pequot and the Puritans was commercial competition. A subject tribe made the best wampum and was forced to deliver most of it to their Pequot overlords, thus giving the Pequot a near monopoly of wampum until the Puritans started mass producing wampum using their metal tools.
The Puritans believed that they were the only hope for good in the world and that the Devil would do anything to destroy them. They also believed that the Indians or Native Americans, who were not Christians, must thus obviously worship the Devil and take orders from him (since that was in their eyes the only alternative to being Christians), and thus it was only a matter of time before the Indians would be ordered by the Devil to exterminate the Puritans - a belief which was likely to become a self fulfilling prophecy.
The recent example of the treacherous Virginia Massacre of 1622 also haunted the imaginations of the Puritan leaders, since it proved that some Indians could be fiendishly evil, and of course the Godly Puritans would be a more tempting target for the minions of the Devil than the sinful evildoers of Virginia.
Gradually the Puritan leaders began to imagine that the powerful Pequot would be the ones who would treacherously attack the Puritans and the sins of the Pequot came to be denounced in the sermons of the Puritan ministers.
Eventually a Puritan expedition burned a Pequot village to teach them a lesson. The Pequot retaliated with terrorism, sending raiding parties to murder a few settlers in Connecticut, some with fiendishly cruel tortures. Then hundreds of Puritans and Indian allies surrounded one of the two main Pequot villages, set fire to it, and slaughtered every man woman, and child who tried to escape the flames. Hundreds were killed. The demoralized Pequot scattered.
Hundreds of Pequot were enslaved by various tribes. The Puritans decreed the end of the Pequot tribe and made it a crime to be a Pequot. All surviving and free Pequot left in Connecticut were forced to stop being Pequot and join their bitter enemies the Mohegans and become Mohegans. But after some years it was found that the Mohegans oppressed the former Pequot too much for even the Puritans to abide, so the tribe was reformed and given two small reservations in 1655.
So Melville was in error to say that the Pequot were extinct in his time. He could have seen the Pequot reservations marked in maps of Connecticut, for example, although he would have had to look at the maps very closely. Apparently Melville knew of the abolition of the Pequot tribe and not of its later reformation.
Melville wrote that the Pequot were as extinct as the ancient Medes. Amusingly, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that most modern inhabitants of north western Iran are mostly descended from the ancient Medes, so being as extinct as the Medes is no big deal.
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