bark up the wrong tree, to

To waste one’s energy or efforts by pursu- ing  the  wrong  scent  or  path. The  term  comes  from  the  1820s, when  rac- coon-hunting  was  a  popular  American  pastime.  Raccoons  are  nocturnal animals  and  generally  are  hunted  on  moonlit  nights  with  the  help  of  spe- cially  trained  dogs.  Sometimes,  however,  the  dogs  are  fooled,  and  they crowd  around  a  tree, barking  loudly, in  the  mistaken  belief  that  they  have treed their quarry when it has actually taken a quite different route. “If you think  to  run  a  rig  on  me,” wrote T. C. Haliburton  (a.k.a. Sam  Slick), “you have  barked  up  the  wrong  tree” (Human  Nature,  1855). The  cliché  became especially common in detective stories in the 1940s, owing to the obvious analogy of hunter and hunted.