If the information contained in the census reports of the Canadas relating to the refugee population of the provinces is misleading, so also is it true that little value can be attached to the estimates made at various times by visitors to the communities of fugitives, most of whom had inadequate data upon which to base their conclusions. These estimates not only differ widely, but sometimes leave room for doubt as to what geographical area and period of time they are intended to cover. Coffin in 1844 was told that there were about forty thousand fugitives in Canada;[648] but eight years later Henson estimated the number at between twenty thousand and thirty thousand, and daily increasing.[649] In the same year (1852) the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada in its _First Annual Report_ stated that there were about thirty thousand colored residents in Canada West.[650] The Rev. Hiram Wilson said from the lecture platform that there were sixty thousand fugitives in Canada, and Elder Anthony Bingey, a coworker with Mr. Wilson, who heard this estimate given by his friend, informed the writer that Mr. Wilson had travelled over the country from Toronto westward and was as competent a judge as could be found in Ontario.[651] John Brown attended a conference at Chatham in the spring of 1858, and his biographer, Mr. R. J. Hinton, thinks there were probably not less than seventy-five thousand fugitives living in Canada West at that time.[652] The Rev. W. M. Mitchell, a negro missionary writing in 1860, was of the opinion that there were sixty thousand colored people in Upper Canada, that fifteen thousand of these were free-born, and that the remaining forty-five thousand were fugitive slaves from the United States.[653] The Rev. Dr. Willes, Professor of Divinity in Toronto College, is quoted as having said that there were about sixty thousand emancipated slaves in Canada, the most of whom had escaped from bondage.[654] Dr. Howe came to the conclusion in 1863 that the whole number of slaves enfranchised by residence in the provinces was between thirty and forty thousand. He thought that at the time of his visit the population did not fall below fifteen thousand nor exceed twenty thousand; although other observers, he said, estimated it as ranging from twenty thousand to thirty thousand.[655] [648] _Reminiscences of Levi Coffin_, p. 253. [649] _The Life of Josiah Henson, formerly a Slave, as narrated by Himself_, Appendix, p. 99. [650] Quoted by Howe in _The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West_, p. 17. [651] Conversation with Mr. Bingey, Windsor, Ont., July 31, 1895. [652] _John Brown and His Men_, p. 171. [653] _The Underground Railroad_, p. 127. [654] _Ibid._, p. 166. [655] _The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West_, pp. 15, 17.