In a two- or three-acre fort, the Pequots were completely surprised in late May 1636 when Mason barred one door, and Underhill the other. In less than an hour it was burned to the ground, with anyone approaching the exit shot; 695 of the 700 Pequots present died. “It was the end of the Pequot nation,” a late nineteenth-century historian reported. “The tribe which had lorded it so fiercely over the New England forests was all at once wiped out of existence.”