Looking at some old westerns where cowboys travel around or herd cattle for long distances, what did they do for money? Did someone carry a huge bag of cash/gold to pay for supplies, lodging when required etc?
Going back further to the like of Marco Polo and others in those times, did they carry around gold or just rely on the generosity of strangers? Hunt for their food?
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People did carry around coinage, and they still do it today. One thing to note, though, is that banking predates money, and in fact it gives rise to it. Banking wasn’t as convenient as it is today, but there was never a time that people managed money (coinage) before banking.
In ancient mesopotamia, people would store grains and whatnot in storehouses, and a record was kept – receipts of who left what to keep track of it. Pretty soon, if I wanted to trade my grain for your goat, instead of going and getting some grain from the storehouse, I would just have the storehouse subtract some grain from my total and put it in your total. To make it easier, I could eventually give you a promissory note, which you could exchange at the storehouse for the thing – much easier than carrying grain around. You can think of these notes as being like checks. But then I could make a general check that you could then turn around and trade again and so on, and that’s the money.
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