What a Company Store in the Wild West Was REALLY Like

Hollywood shows you the company store as a friendly general store. The truth is colder: in a mining camp, the store paid you, housed you, and kept the book on everything you owed — in money that only worked in one shop. Sam hires on at a southern Colorado coal camp and gets paid in scrip: one store, a month's wait for payday, five percent to draw ahead, and fifteen to twenty-five percent lost to a broker for cash. Payday is a subtraction — and leaving means leaving his money behind. Last time — What a Town Bank in the Wild West Was REALLY Like:    • What a Town Bank in the Wild West Was REAL...   CHAPTERS: 0:00.0 The friendly store that wasn't 0:31.9 What scrip actually was 0:57.9 Money that worked in one shop 1:40.5 Paid once a month 2:23.2 Turning scrip into cash 2:48.2 The ledger ate first 3:04.6 What the prices really were 3:36.2 Why he couldn't walk away 4:03.9 Subscribe: the catalog next week 4:18.8 The scales belonged to the company 4:41.4 Payday was a subtraction 5:11.0 Not every camp was a trap 5:44.7 When the shop closed 6:09.9 Small tokens, by design 6:50.2 Outlawed in 1938 7:09.0 Sixteen Tons 8:10.6 Money is only money if somebody takes it 8:47.8 Next week: the mail-order catalog Music: "Drankin Song" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...) New videos every day. Saddle up — the truth rides here. #WildWest #OldWestHistory #FrontierLife #Cowboys