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Michigan STARTING LIFE ANEW IN THE WOODS
It was so lean it would not fry itself. We had to boil it in half a dozen waters, and then it would not pass as "legal tender" with any one who knew what pork was. We would occasionally kill a deer, and then venison would supply our tables with meat.
My father had brought five hundred pounds of codfish from New York. This we exchanged for pork with our neighbors. This exchanging of one thing for another was called "paying in dicker, " a word found in old authors, but was not heretofore used in this country. It comes from the Greek decka-ien, and from its use as a numeral, it was, in time, used for the things themselves. This "dicker" was all the money we had in circulation, and was of denominations so various that we cannot name them here. Each settler was a banker, and all his movable property—large and small—was his bank stock. This he threw upon the market, as money, and used it as such. He paid for an ox-yoke by giving for it its equivalent in so many pounds of pork. This was the first original start of trade—giving the products of one kind of labor for those of another. Dicker was all the money the settlers had until paper money or specie found its way into the settlement, and then this old banking system was abandoned.
The pioneer did not take the poet's advice—"neither a borrower nor a lender be. " During the first decade of his life here he "spelled his way along" with the ax and the plow. Borrowing, sometimes, was the very means that helped him out of difficulty and set his enterprise going again. Everybody borrowed and everybody lent; and by it business was kept prosperous and suffering often avoided.
Early Michigan
Page 5
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