Do you prefer bucks or dollars?

"The middle ground, it is true, had by the late eighteenth century operated to create a common system of exchange and even unit systems of values. Traders in the southern pays d'en haut [roughly, the Great Lakes region] had, for instance, instituted the buck--the hide of a large male white-tailed deer--as the standard unit in whose terms they calculated both the value of other furs and of European manufactures. The buck, in turn, became equated with an American silver dollar." (484) --Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815

White-tailed Deer
(From U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)

A world of explanation: White defines the "middle ground" as the "place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages." In other words, the middle ground is not necessarily a geographic place. It was the "place" at which two completely different cultures, Indians and Europeans, could meet, understand each other, and establish trading relationships. As a general idea, this idea of a middle ground could apply to many different instances in history. White has chosen to apply the concept to the Great Lakes Region from the 17th to 19th centuries.

So a buck was a originally a real buckskin, not a paper dollar! Actually, almost anything can serve as money. Buckskins, paper, silver, gold, beads, tobacco, have all been used as money in the past. The major requirement is that when you receive money in exchange for your goods or services, you have confidence that you can turn around and use the money to purchase something you want to buy--in other words, that that person will accept your money.