POLITICS & GOVERNMENT

A Man Named Two: A Tavern, a Warrant, and the Toledo War

He stabbed a deputy sheriff, fled to Ohio's governor, and left two governments fighting over him.

An 1834 map of the disputed boundary between Michigan and Ohio, David H. Burr, “Map, boundary, Michigan and Ohio,” 1834, prepared for the U.S. House. Boston Public Library via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

On July 15, 1835, a deputy sheriff and a constable from Monroe County, Michigan, walked into a tavern in Toledo carrying warrants. The constable went for George McKay first. McKay picked up a chair and a long dagger, and the constable discovered that his job had become complicated.

The deputy sheriff turned to the other man on his list, Two Stickney, and showed him the warrant. Two had one question: Was it issued under Ohio or Michigan?

Michigan, it turned out. Two said he would not be taken on a Michigan warrant, though he would go quietly if it were an Ohio one. The deputy sheriff took him by the collar. A brief struggle followed. Then the constable saw Two draw a dagger, and heard him say, "there, damn you, you have got it." Two had stabbed the deputy sheriff in the left side.

Two got away. Forty or fifty people gathered at the tavern, and the constable, who had come to arrest two men and would leave with neither, left for his own safety.

Asking which state had issued a warrant sounds like an odd question. In Toledo in…