Tomahawk
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Tomahawk. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
an Indian hatchet or ax used in war and in the chase, not only in hand-to-hand combats, but also by being thrown to a considerable distance so as to strike the object with the A COUNT LYOF TOLSTOY ward traveled extensively. In 1861 he took up permanent residence on his country estate. Among his earliest works are: "Detsvo" "Otrchestvo" (Boyhood), and "Iunost" (Childhood), (Youth); also "Cossacks," "Sevastopol," and the poll of the ax, to meet one passsharp edge. The native tomahawks have but steel tomahawks are supplied to the heads of stone attached by thongs, etc., Indians by the governments and traders with whom they deal, and a pipe is usudrilled through the bottom of the bowl ally attached to the poll. A hole is ing through the length of the handle. As a nautical term, a poleax. To bury the tomahawk means to make peace; it being the custom of the Indians to bury the tomahawk during the time of peace; so to dig up the tomahawk means to go to war, to fall into dispute. TOMALES (-mä'les) BAY, an arm of the Pacific, on the coast of California, 35 miles N. W. of San Francisco.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the war ax of the North American Indian. The tomahawk with which Powhatan prepared to end the life of Captain John Smith consisted probably of an A-shaped piece of edged stone, lashed with a buckskin thong into a wooden handle. Not infrequently a prong of deer's horn was thrust like the blade of a pickax into a hole in the end of a wooden handle. The early navigators found metal tomahawks a profitable article of trade. The natives gladly exchanged incredible quantities of fine furs for shining tomahawks. The tomahawk, the scalping knife, and the bow and arrow are the traditional Indian weapons. Of the three the tomahawk is most typical of Indian customs. When peace was concluded the braves sat about the council fire and "buried the tomahawk." When they were about to go on a warpath, they "dug up the tomahawk." The war pipe, as well as the pipe of peace, not infrequently took the form of a tomahawk. The blunt end of the ax was hollowed to form a bowl. The handle, usually a piece of sapling, was pierced by pushing out the pith to form the stem of the pipe. See Indians
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts treat the tomahawk as a living weapon of "the North American Indian," and Aiton's in 1910 repeats as fact the story of Powhatan preparing to kill Captain John Smith with a stone-bladed axe -- an episode historians now treat with heavy scepticism, since Smith told it only years afterwards and it may have been a ritual of adoption rather than an execution. Scholarship has also reversed one detail these entries take for granted: the pipe-tomahawk, with its bowl in the poll and hollowed sapling handle, was largely a European and colonial manufacture, made in England, France and America as a diplomatic gift and trade good rather than a native design. The word itself is now traced to Virginia Algonquian tamahaac, recorded in the early 1600s. Since 1983 the commonest thing called a Tomahawk has been a US Navy cruise missile, fired in quantity from the 1991 Gulf War onward, while the "tomahawk chop" at American ballgames has become a standing grievance for Native American groups.
Written for this edition, 2026.