4 Dollars

The Bank of Western Canada was chartered in 1857 and headquartered in Clifton, Ontario — the Canadian side of the Niagara Falls crossing — positioning it to capture cross-border commercial traffic. It never achieved meaningful scale. The four-dollar denomination was a Canadian banking convention designed to complement the Spanish milled dollar still circulating widely in the region, allowing easy change-making against the five-dollar note.

The bank collapsed before Confederation, its charter effectively dead by the early 1860s. Notes printed by the American Bank Note Company but never fully issued survived in much larger quantities than circulated examples, which is why unissued remainders dominate the collector market for this series.