I don't think David made *that* mistake, if only because 43M is a lot more than the population of the U.S. at the time, and most of them were never in New York state anyway. A mental calculation says that's about 120,000 or 130,000 per day on average, which was a lot of moving around in those days. Hal Morris: [log in to unmask] -- Editor of: * H-SHEAR Web pages: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~shear * Tales of the Early Republic: http://www.panix.com/~hal Web Resources: Bibliography, Biographical Dict... (work in progress) * Jacksonian Miscellanies: free email weekly of source excerpts. On Wed, 14 Jul 1999, Shirley wrote: > Transit agencies count each passenger boarding, so the figure represents that. > It doesn't mean that 43M+ individuals rode their conveyances. That's why the > figure appears so misleading. > > David Minor wrote: > > > > York Staters, > > > > According to French's Gazetteer of 1860 in the fiscal year ending > > September 30, 1858, New York State trains had carried 43,786,579 > > passengers. If I'm reading the report correctly, that's a lot of > > people. Does anyone else have any thoughts on the accuracy of that > > count? >