1 Dollar Western Exchange Fire and Marine Insurance Co.

Insurance companies issuing currency was a legitimate, if legally ambiguous, practice in pre-Civil War America, particularly in frontier territories where chartered banks were scarce or outright prohibited. Nebraska Territory in 1856 had no state banking law whatsoever — the legislature hadn't gotten around to it — which created a vacuum that entrepreneurial firms like Western Exchange filled by circulating their own obligations.

Omaha City was barely two years old when this note was printed there, platted only in 1854 following the Kansas-Nebraska Act. A locally printed obligation from a non-bank insurer in a territorial town of a few hundred people is about as early as Nebraska paper gets.