The value in this market

At the end of August 1843 the merchants Sinclear and Chittenden sat down in Fort Wayne to write their weekly circular. It went to the Sentinel, which printed it under the heading of the Fort Wayne market, and most weeks it was a list of what things cost. Wheat, 62 to 65 cents a bushel. Oats, 22 to 25. Flour, three and a half to four dollars a barrel. Onions, 50.

That week they added something. "Our currency should find a place here," they wrote, and then they set out the paper a farmer might be handed across their counter.

Scrip proper had been issued to pay the state's domestic debt. Bank scrip had paid the state's debt to the State Bank of Indiana, for money the bank had advanced to canal contractors. Then there were the dogs.

"White Dog is a scrip originally issued to pay balances due to Contractors." It was still being paid out for repairs and other expenses on the Wabash and Erie Canal east of Lafayette, and it could be used to buy canal lands east of the Tippecanoe.

Blue Dog had been issued for the canal's extension from Lafayette to Terre Haute, backed by the lands set aside for that extension. By a law of the previous winter it could now pay tolls on the canal.

And below the Blue Dog, the Blue Pup.

"Blue Pup is a shin plaster currency issued in small amounts by Contractors on the Extension, payable in Blue Dog." Some of it, the merchants allowed, was "undoubtedly as good as the Blue Dog, except its not being receivable for tolls." The rest was unsafe, "as there is no limit to its issue."

Then the prices.

The following is the value in this market: Scrip, old, 85 a 90 Bank Scrip, 85 White Dog, according to date, 80 a 90 Blue Dog, 40 Blue Pup,

Against Blue Pup there was no figure at all, only a rule.

A dollar in old scrip bought 85 or 90 cents of goods in Fort Wayne that week. A dollar in Blue Dog bought 40. Nobody would put a number on the Pup.

None of this paper was new to the town. Three years earlier Stephen Coles had advertised that he would sell produce and flour and take state notes, "called White Dog," at 75 cents on the dollar. The Sentinel itself took scrip for subscriptions and allowed seventy-five cents on the dollar for it on printing accounts. Other merchants advertised that White Dog would be taken in exchange for goods. That September the Sentinel reported that on an earlier trip of the boat Illinois, between Defiance and the state line, the captain "had his pocket picked of a wallet containing $45 blue dog, 2 counterfeit $5 bills, and $12 in good money."

What the circular did was put the kinds side by side, with a figure against each, in the one place a farmer coming in with wheat would look.

It ran once more. On 14 October the circular said: "According to promise we republish our notice of Indiana currency." The figures were the same, word for word and cent for cent. Whether the market had not moved in six weeks, or the merchants had not repriced it, the paper does not say.

That is nearly the whole of the Fort Wayne record. Indiana's canal scrip is well covered in the state's monetary histories, and the dogs had names everywhere along the canal. What the Sentinel adds is a Fort Wayne price, and the held run of the paper carries it for one week, printed twice. The weekly market table in the years around it priced pork and oats and salt, never money. Discounts on scrip that turn up in other columns were quoted from Cincinnati.

The circular did not last in its old form either. By December some of the paper's readers objected to a merchants' circular appearing as the paper's own market report, and the editor printed his reply. Sinclear and Chittenden, he wrote, had resolved to publish it from then on as an advertisement.

The dogs outlived it. In November 1845 a Fort Wayne merchant was still advertising that he would take state scrip, White Dog and Blue Pup, along with county and corporation orders, "at cash price for goods."