That’s not a gun, it’s a log painted black. Both sides in the Civil War used “Quaker guns” to frighten the enemy in order to buy time. “We were confronted by a mammoth gun that threatened to blow the Union clear over the north pole,” remembered one Indiana volunteer in 1894. “The mammoth gun proved afterward to be a log that had been mounted and painted to resemble a columbiad.”

Two further Civil War oddities:

Each side, improbably, had a general named Henry H. Sibley. Henry Hastings Sibley (left) spent most of the war protecting settlements from the Sioux on the western frontier. He went on to become the first governor of Minnesota. His counterpart, Henry Hopkins Sibley, also served in the west, leading the Confederate States Army in the New Mexico Territory. The two never faced one another.

In July 1863 Union general Edward H. Hobson captured most of Confederate general John Hunt Morgan’s forces at the Battle of Buffington Island in Ohio. Undaunted, Morgan tunneled out of prison and returned the favor, capturing Hobson and about 750 men one year later near Cynthiana, Ky.