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by Daydreamer on July 19th, 2005

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What is the origin of the phrase "bury the hatchet"?

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  • by G-Diddy on July 20th, 2005

    G-Diddy

    ‘Bury the hatchet’ is an Indianism (a phrase borrowed from Native American speech). The term comes from an Iroquois ceremony in which war axes or other weapons were literally buried in the ground as a symbol of newly made peace.

    European missionaries and settlers took note of the tradition in the seventeenth century. French records from 1644 relate that the Iroquois visiting Quebec "proclaim that they wish to unite all the nations of the earth and to hurl the hatchet so far into the depths of the earth that it shall never again be seen in the future" [translation from Thwaites' monumental ‘Jesuit Relations’].

    The first mention of the practice in English is to an actual hatchet-burying ceremony. Years before he gained notoriety for presiding over the Salem witch trials, Samuel Sewall wrote in 1680, "I writt to you in one [letter] of the Mischief the Mohawks did; which occasioned Major Pynchon's goeing to Albany, where meeting with the Sachem the[y] came to an agreemt and buried two Axes in the Ground; one for English another for themselves; which ceremony to them is more significant & binding than all Articles of Peace[,] the hatchet being a principal weapon with them."

    If the phrase is of Indian origin, why ‘hatchet’ and not ‘tomahawk’? It wasn't always. In 1705 Beverly wrote of "very ceremonious ways to concluding of Peace, such as burying a Tomahawk." Tomahawk variations remained popular for over a century, but eventually ‘hatchet’ buried ‘tomahawk.’ That's not inappropriate, since tomahawk is an Algonquian word, not Iroquoian.

    Though the practice was familiar early on, the exact phrase ‘bury the hatchet’ didn't crop up until 1754. A manuscript from that year reads, "We have ordered our Governor of New York to hold an interview with them [the Iroquois] for delivering those presents [and] for burying the hatchet."

    “Buried was the bloody hatchet;
    Buried was the dreadful war-club;
    Buried were all warlike weapons,
    And the war-cry was forgotten;
    Then was peace among the nations.”
    Longfellow: Hiawatha, xiii.

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