Frontier money

In many places larger companies would mint tokens or notes to make up the shortage of circulating official coin. The better ones were sometimes better than government money in their primary circulating area. Similar coins and notes were printed for Company Stores, usable only to buy at inflated prices from your (effective) owner. Some of those Company Store peonage operations were frightening.

Others allowed the notes to be circulated, with a promise to purchase them back (effectively making them cheques) but there were many scams. Often the notes were printed on paper that was fragile using soluble inks. Get them wet, handle them, do anything much and they became useless scrap.

Some bosses baked the notes brown and crumbly so they wouldn't last long enough to be spent.

Here in southern Queensland they were known as Calabashes, nobody seems certain why. More generally in Australia they were called shin plasters (possibly derived from chin plasters after the use of scraps of paper to stem bleeding shaving cuts).