bury the hatchet, to

Fig. to make peace. Let's stop arguing and bury the hatchet. Tom and I buried the hatchet and we are good friends now.

Make peace; settle one's differences. For example, Toward the end of the year, the roommates finally decided to bury the hatchet. Although some believe this term comes from a Native American custom for declaring peace between warring tribes, others say it comes from hang up one's hatchet, a term dating from the early 1300s (well before Columbus landed in the New World). The word bury replaced hang up in the 1700s.

When people who have argued bury the hatchet, they agree to forget their argument and become friends again. Note: A hatchet is a small axe. They had finally buried the hatchet after their falling-out. Note: In the past, when Native American tribes made peace after fighting each other, it was traditional for each tribe to bury a tomahawk or small axe, as a sign of peace.

To stop fighting; resolve a quarrel.

To make peace or call a truce. Some North American Indian tribes declared peace by burying a tomahawk, a custom described by Samuel Sewell in 1680 and referred to again in subsequent accounts of the American colonies. The term appears in Longfellow’s famous poem, “Hiawatha,” and by the end of the nineteenth century was a cliché for peacemaking on both sides of the Atlantic.

To make peace, to settle differences. The phrase comes from the practice among native American and Canadian tribes literally to bury a war axe at the end of hostilities. An 1680 report describes European colonists in what became New England: “Meeting wth ye Sachem [the tribal leaders] the[y] came to an agreemt and buried two Axes in ye Ground; which ceremony to them is more significant & binding than all Articles of Peace . . .”