bark up the wrong tree

Example: “If you think I took your charger, you're barking up the wrong tree.”

Origin: American, from the early 1800s, and specifically from hunting raccoons rather than game in general. Raccoon hunting is done at night with dogs that pursue the animal until it climbs, then hold position at the base and bark to bring the hunters to the spot. The system depends entirely on the dog being right, and raccoons are good at making it wrong — moving between touching branches, doubling back, or leaving a tree before the hunters arrive — so a dog baying with complete conviction at an empty tree was a familiar and faintly comic sight. That is the exact force of the idiom: not simply being mistaken, but pursuing the wrong target loudly and with total confidence. It appears in print by the 1830s and was popularized in the tall tales surrounding Davy Crockett.