As Brown tells it, in the fall of 1835, he found himself broke in Monroe, Michigan, having been cheated out of his summer’s earnings by a dishonest steamship captain. Brown sought employment with the local barber and, after being repeatedly turned down, he embraced the spirit of the free market and opened his own shop directly across the street from his competition. According to Brown, one of the barber’s customers offered him “a room in which to commence business. . . on the opposite side of the street” as well as his influence with the townspeople. Brown eagerly accepted and, in order to attract new business, made an impressive sign for the barbershop, advertising himself as the “Fashionable Hair-dresser from New York, Emperor of the West”. Although “the Emperor” had never actually been to New York, his marketing strategy was a great success. He reports that “in a few weeks I had the entire business of the town, to the great discomfiture of the other barber”. Flush with profit, Brown took the advice of a friend and printed and distributed “shinplasters”: promissory notes for small amounts of money — spare change, essentially — that he could give to his customers, and which would then circulate alongside other kinds of money in Monroe. Brown offers his readers a detailed explanation of this unusual economic situation:
At this time, money matters in the Western States were in a sad condition. Any person who could raise a small amount of money was permitted to establish a bank, and allowed to issue notes for four times the sum raised. This being the case, many persons borrowed money merely long enough to exhibit to the bank inspectors, and the borrowed money was returned, and the bank left without a dollar in its vaults, if indeed it had a vault about its premises. The result was that banks were started all over the Western States, and the country flooded with worthless paper. These were known as the ‘Wild Cat Banks.’ Silver coin being very scarce, and the [state-chartered] banks not being allowed to issue notes for a smaller amount than one dollar, several persons put out notes of from 6 to 75 cents in value; these were called ‘Shinplasters.’ The Shinplaster was in the shape of a promissory note, made payable on demand. I have often seen persons with large rolls of these bills, the whole not amounting to more than five dollars.
As Brown explains it, the lack of small change in Monroe — a nationwide scarcity in this period — created a demand for shinplasters: small denomination bills issued by private businesses serving as Wildcat banks (like Brown’s barber shop) and backed by nothing more than the confidence of the local community. In Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic, Joshua R. Greenberg recounts how during the 1830s these western banks were often labelled as fraudulent, “wild cat” organizations, the joke being that such banks — in order to discourage anyone from trying to redeem their notes — were “located in areas so remote that only wildcats lived nearby”. Value often decreased over distance: dollars from a Monroe, Michigan bank were worth less in New York City because the issuing bank was regarded as unreliable, while the note itself was harder to redeem (the note holder would have to travel almost six hundred miles to cash it, if it could be cashed at all). Americans would need to constantly haggle over the perceived value of hundreds of different bank notes in their day-to-day lives, while papers like Counterfeit Detector and Bank Note List and Thompson’s Bank Note Reporter provided detailed — and constantly shifting — lists of which notes were reliable and which were not.