To bury the hatchet is to end a quarrel and make peace. The image is vivid: weapons put out of reach, hostility set aside. It is commonly linked to Indigenous diplomacy in North America, where burying or otherwise laying down weapons could symbolize an agreement to stop fighting. European colonial accounts from the 1680s describe such gestures, offering an early written record of the practice behind the expression.
Those accounts provide context, not a single, certain origin story. Indigenous nations had distinct customs and diplomatic traditions; there is no reason to treat burying a weapon as a universal ceremony shared by all of them. Nor can the surviving reports establish exactly when the English idiom was coined. They do show that European observers encountered weapon-burying as a sign of peace, and that the image could readily become a metaphor for putting conflict behind you.
The expression’s literal sense gradually broadened into its familiar figurative one: people need not be at war, or even possess hatchets, to bury them. By the 18th century, the phrase was used for reconciling after a dispute. The familiar retelling—that chiefs invariably sealed every truce by ceremonially burying tomahawks—makes a varied history sound more uniform than the evidence supports. The underlying symbolism is credible; a single inventor, date, or standard ritual is not established.
Today, the phrase can describe anything from a private disagreement to a long-running public feud. “After months of arguing over the project, the two managers finally buried the hatchet.” “The neighbors agreed to bury the hatchet and share responsibility for the fence.” In both cases, the hatchet stands for the grievance itself, and burying it means choosing cooperation over continued resentment.
The phrase endures because its image makes reconciliation feel tangible: the conflict is not denied, but deliberately laid to rest.