{{Short description|Term for European Americans}} {{distinguish|text=the Nazi purge known as the Night of the Long Knives}} {{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}} '''"Long knives"''' was a term used by the Iroquois, and later by the Mingo and other indigenous peoples of the Ohio Country to designate white settlers from Virginia, in contradistinction to those of New York and Pennsylvania.
It is a literal translation of the treaty name that the Iroquois first bestowed on Governor Lord Howard in 1684, ''Assarigoe'' (variously spelled ''Assaregoa, Assaragoa, Asharigoua''), meaning "cutlass" in Onondaga. This word was chosen as a pun on Howard's name, which sounds like Dutch ''houwer'' meaning "cutlass"<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=MZurlZfg1fAC&dq=hower+cutlass&pg=PA141 contemporary 17th c. source affirming Dutch ''hower'' = "cutlass"]</ref> (similar to the Iroquois' choice of the name ''Onas'', or "quill pen", for the Pennsylvania Governors, beginning with William Penn.) This is the very explanation included within official diplomatic correspondence addressed by the Iroquois sachems themselves to then-governor Spotswood in 1722.<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=8DJEAQAAMAAJ&dq=hower+cutlass&pg=PA251 Iroquois-Virginia negotiations of 1722] – (note the date 1784 is incorrectly printed here for 1684).</ref>
George Rogers Clark spoke of himself and men as "Big Knives" or Virginians, in his speeches to the Indians in 1778 after the capture of Illinois. In the latter part of the American Revolutionary War, down to and during the War of 1812, the term was used to designate "Americans".
==References== <references /> * ''Dictionary of American History'' by James Truslow Adams, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940. *[https://books.google.com/books?id=vGn7e2hidwgC&dq=mingo+junction+long+knives&pg=PA78 Chronicles of Border Warfare: "A history of whites and of the Indian Wars and Massacres", Alexander Scott Withers, 1831 p78-79.]
{{White people terms}}
Category:Colony of Virginia Category:Native American history of Virginia Category:Exonyms Category:American Revolutionary War Category:War of 1812 Category:Haudenosaunee
{{Terminology-stub}}