The Man Who Went to War With canada

lol, cool story . worth the read



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That tale goes like this. In the spring of 1865, in an attempt to avoid the Civil War, Tall Barney went out to sea for a while. (“He was a skedaddler,” says Davis.) When he wanted to land, he camped out on Machias Seal Island.

Although he had not been inspired to defend the Union (citing his Quaker beliefs), he wasn’t without a defensive territorial instinct. When the Canadians came and tried to rout him from what they considered their land, “he physically threw some of them off the island,” says Plaskon.

Here the story splinters. In some versions, he tossed the Canadians off of his boat, or their own. But each version ends the same way: Tall Barney promised “his” island to the first male descendant to be named after him. It took a couple of generations, but that was Barna Norton, born June 9, 1915. And in this way, a centuries-long international land dispute took on a new dimension—a personal one.