I chatted up former Haines city administrator Tom Healy during a chance meeting on the ferry a couple years back and he got to reminiscing about things he appreciated about Haines. Healy had gone on to work many years as the municipal manager of Palmer, Alaska.
The Haines barter economy, Healy said, was one of the interesting facets about the town that he liked.
I was surprised by Healy’s observation. I was familiar with barter around town, but I figured it wasn’t unique to Haines. Cash always has been scarce in rural Alaska and people find ways to make ends meet.
You babysit for me tonight; I’ll babysit for you next Friday. You help me build my cabin for two days; I’ll replace the head gasket on your pickup. Such arrangements are natural in places where folks have more time than money. The bakery owner might swap a dozen donuts for a pizza from the owner of the pizzeria.
Barter makes sense because capitalism isn’t so much about getting money as it is about getting what you want.
One of the more interesting twists on the Alaska barter economy was a ruling by the Federal Subsistence Board a few years ago that cash, in fact, was a form of barter in the subsistence economy, particularly in cash-poor villages where able-bodied hunters and fishermen often provided for others.
In those places, federal anthropologists said, cash can be secondary to barter, and a form of barter. For example, if you are swapping some fish you caught for a more valuable amount of moose that your neighbor shot, you might also give your neighbor some money to cover his gasoline and bullets.
Predictably, urban Alaskans went nuts at the idea of cash as “customary trade.” They said such a designation ominously blurred the line between “true subsistence” and the cash economy. If there’s cash, it’s not subsistence, they said, not fully appreciating that the separation between those two ideas amounts to semantics to a hungry man.
While poking through my father’s library back in Pennsylvania recently, I came across “Alaska’s Coinage Through the Years,” a book published in 1965 about trade tokens, or as they were called here, “bingles.”.
According to the book, bingles were “widely used in this vast country in the early days mainly because of the acute shortage of coins and currency. For much of the time, no legal tender was available and gold and furs were used as substitutes. Tokens were issued by merchants as a more practical means of exchange” and they were good for business, encouraging customers to return to issuing stores.
Under a chapter on Haines, the book includes pictures of local bingles, including metal tokens issued by Haines Packing Co., J.M. Chisel, Fred Brouillette and Tim Vogel’s Club Saloon, among others. The coins were minted bearing the name of the business on one side, and on the opposite side, the coin’s denomination, such as “Good for 10 Cents in Trade.”
Bingles are still in use, of course. The Chilkat Bakery for years gave out ones redeemable for a cup of coffee. When opened as a tourist attraction at the fairgrounds, Dalton City issued wooden coins of token value to customers paying admission as an incentive for them to return.
At local bars, wooden or metal drink tokens are typically distributed when a customer buys a round for the house. Besides saving bartenders from pouring dozens of drinks, tokens serve to keep bars within the law, as Alaska limits the number of drinks that can be poured for a single customer.
(And if a customer goes home or leaves town without redeeming their drink chip, that bingle becomes money in the bank for the bar, or booze in the bottle.)
Barter or bingles, each is a jury-rigged spin on currency that keeps the real economy going, with cash or without. They’re about making do, and that’s a notion as Alaskan as Alaska gets.