25 Kopeks

The Russian-American Company was a chartered trading monopoly operating out of Russian Alaska — think Hudson's Bay Company, but answering to the Tsar. Its paper scrip circulated internally among company employees and Indigenous laborers at settlements like Sitka, where coined money was scarce and inconvenient to ship across the Pacific. These notes functioned as a closed-loop currency: issued by the company, redeemable only at company stores, and worthless outside the colony.

The thirty-six-year span of issue reflects reuse of the same basic instrument rather than a continuous print run — surviving examples vary in manuscript dates and signatories. Alaska was sold to the United States in 1867, and the company wound down shortly after, leaving this scrip among the rarest North American colonial paper issues by volume of survivors.