Politics & Power Quote by Zebulon Pike

“Smoke the pipe of peace, bury the tomahawk, and become one nation” is the kind of velvet-glove rhetoric early U.S. expansion loved: ceremonial, vivid, and quietly coercive. Pike, a soldier and explorer operating on the moving edge of American territory, isn’t just urging calm. He’s offering a script for surrender that flatters its audience with the language of reconciliation.

The phrase works because it borrows Indigenous diplomatic symbols while steering them toward an American endpoint. “Pipe of peace” and “bury the tomahawk” are cultural shorthand, easy for U.S. officials to deploy as proof of good faith. But the real payload lands in the final clause: “become one nation.” Peace is framed as assimilation, not coexistence. The deal isn’t “live as neighbors” or “honor boundaries”; it’s merge into a single political identity with the United States as the default template.

Context matters: Pike’s career sits in the post-Louisiana Purchase moment, when the government was mapping, claiming, and policing space faster than it could legitimately govern it. Soldiers on the frontier served as diplomats, surveyors, and enforcers, often using conciliatory language to reduce resistance while treaties and settlements tightened the vise. The subtext is a power imbalance made to sound like mutual choice: lay down arms, accept U.S. authority, and you’ll be folded into “nationhood” on terms you didn’t set.

It’s a neat rhetorical trick: turning domination into unity, and annexation into peace.