You’re Barking Up the Wrong Tree, Mate!

We’ve all barked up the wrong tree at one time or another, haven’t we? We’ve made an incorrect assumption, asked the wrong person, accused someone of something when in fact they were innocent. We were barking up the wrong tree. Dogs sometimes bark up the wrong tree, too. Especially hunting dogs, and especially when those pesky raccoons fool them. You see, this idiom came from its literal meaning: hunting dogs literally stood at the base of a tree, barking at a prey that is elsewhere. Simple, right? But how did we come to use it in the metaphorical sense that we do today?

The modern usage dates back to America in the early 1800s, when it became a popular saying. The earliest printed example appears in Westward Ho! by James Kirke Paulding in 1832:

Here he made a note in his book, and I begun to smoke him for one of those fellows that drive a sort of a trade of making books about old Kentuck and the western country: so I thought I’d set him barking up the wrong tree a little, and I told him some stories that were enough to set the Mississippi a-fire; but he put them all down in his book.

It seems that, after that, it very quickly became common parlance, for it appeared in many newspapers and articles throughout the 1830s. Today, of course, it’s become so ingrained in our language that we don’t question it. It’s even the title of a book all about why everything we’ve ever been told is completely and entirely wrong!

Well played, raccoons. You not only escaped with your life and made the dog look an idiot, but we haven’t stopped talking about it since!