<Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This article needs additional citations for verification . Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources . Unsourced material may be challenged and removed . (February 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) </Td> </Tr> </Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This article needs additional citations for verification . Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources . Unsourced material may be challenged and removed . (February 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) </Td> </Tr> <P> Bury the hatchet is an American English idiom meaning "to make peace". The phrase is an allusion to the figurative or literal practice of putting away the tomahawk at the cessation of hostilities among or by Native Americans in the Eastern United States, specifically concerning the formation of the Iroquois Confederacy and in Iroquois custom in general . Weapons were to be buried or otherwise cached in time of peace . </P> <P> 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 write 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 agreement 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 ." </P>

What is the meaning of to bury the hatchet