10 Dollars

The Banque du Peuple was a Montreal cooperative banking venture incorporated in 1835, organized in part to serve the French-Canadian merchant class that found itself consistently underserved by the Bank of Montreal and other anglophone-controlled institutions. Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Co. in New York handled much of the engraved note printing for Canadian private banks during this period — the quality of their work was simply unavailable in Montreal at the time.

The bank survived until 1895, when it collapsed in a fraud scandal that wiped out a significant portion of its depositors. Notes from the 1836 emission predate that failure by nearly six decades.