Another 2019 reprint, this time with a new thought appended.
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KSHS has resumed adding new items regularly. One of the new items, a store ledger, triggered curiosity which led to a much more interesting older item.
A ledger from the store that was outfitting fur traders in the Louisiana Territory around 1812. It’s in French, with some plain English. Deeply fascinating to an old bookkeeper. I’m sure real historians have answered all these questions, but I’m having fun trying to solve them.
Title on first page:
La Compagny des Fourures du Missoury dans son Avanture.
Here’s the top few lines of an account for trader Brice Arnold, showing the ledger structure clearly.
The debit column (Doit) is equipment sold to the fur traders, the credit column (Avoir) is furs bought from the traders. Note the Avoir column is closed out with “Your bill given this day.”
The money units are puzzling. The two columns are P and S. My first thought was Poids et Shillings, but it appears that Pesos were the dominant currency in the territory at that time.
The S unit is 100ths of the P unit, not 8ths or 20ths. According to online sources, the peso would have been divided into 8 reales at this time, and centavos didn’t start until 1863. No firm answer to this question. Was it just US dollars and cents, labeled P and S by tradition?
We have the $ sign on totals, which meant pesos before it meant dollars. One credible explanation of the symbol traces it to a habit of writing an abbreviation for Pesos as a big P with a little s as a diacritic on top. These clerks were precise with their pens, and their dollar sign always had a big belly and a little head. You can almost see a big P with a little s riding on it. They clearly weren’t thinking of the whole symbol as an S with lines through it; their uppercase S is entirely different.
Note the marks after each number. Decimal points? Nope, ditto marks. The clerk meticulously repeated the ditto after each number in each column, indicating that all the left numbers were P and all the right numbers were S.
Columnar accounting belongs to the Roman era, not to the modern place-value era. Monetary units were mostly non-decimal, so the tradition of recording each unit in its own independent column made sense, and there was no reason for decimal points. Note that some of the S numbers are followed by fractions, which was still common in US pricing up till WW2 when inflation made fractional cents meaningless.
Roman and Arabic coexisted in the clerk’s mind. Note the efficient use of both in month names. September is 7bre, October is 8bre, November is 9bre, and December is Xbre. Minimizing penstrokes.
There were some big names among the fursellers on the Avoir side. Chouteau, Clark, Gratiot, O’Fallon, all recognized as towns or streets.
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New thought: Bits = Reales. 8 subunits within the peso or dollar. We always assume that Bits were literal chopped-up sections of a gold coin. This is nonsense. Such choppings would be difficult and wasteful, and impossible to quantify. In these literal imaginings we miss one CRUCIAL fact. Money has always been more abstract than physical. Bits and Bucks existed before Dollars, and both represented fractions of a pound in England.
In the 1880s when real gold and silver coins were active, 95% of all transactions were by check or money order, 4% by paper currency, and less than 1% by actual metal. The proportion of checks is somewhat larger now, but maybe not if you consider the worldwide use of dollar rectangles.
Bits or Reales were part of an older binary-fraction setup, retained in measures like inches and ounces and cups. Our money was binary before it was decimal.
Polistra's Mill 