So the thing that binds together the Western outlaw staple of “the payroll train”; the “company town” where labor is paid in “chits” for the company store; and the way after the Civil War so many newly emancipated slaves left the plantation, failed to thrive, and died (because despite their productive talents, the South simply did not have the capacity for that much wage labor, you’ll recall that the ensuing sharecropping system was based on store credit):

For a long time, basically until the founding of the Federal Reserve and the massive materiel exports and war loans of WWI, both in the 1910s, America often physically did not have enough money - specie - to properly run its economy, especially at the frontier, and attempts to create more without gold backing led to regular bank runs and economic collapse in a pretty severe 15-year-or-so boom and bust cycle