While the new transport modes of steam on rail and seaways were proving so potent in shaping the colonial economy, the everyday experience of transport for most colonists was of the age-old modes of human and animal muscles driving feet, hooves and wooden wheels over roads and tracks. As in Britain, draught and saddle horses were a major element of road transport. The new railways did not displace the horse in Britain. Both her human and her horse population more than doubled during Victoria's reign. The railways provided increased opportunities for local carriers, rather than destroying their livelihood, so that ‘at a conservative estimate there were at least 20,000 carriers in business in the 1880s'.¹⁵ The settlers had come from a community in which the horse was flourishing; they adapted its traditions and technology to an environment in which the horse flourished even more strikingly. The returns of the 1881 census of Great Britain show 55 horses to every 1,000 of population. The New Zealand 1886 census showed that the colony had 324 horses per 1,000. For neither country do we know how many of these horses were saddle, how many draught, or how many were used in country, how many in town. We do know that keeping a riding horse in Victorian Britain was an expensive business. An ordinary riding mount cost from £20 to £50 (or from one to three years wages for a labourer), and its fodder cost 5s to 10s a week. Keeping a horse indicated that one was at least moderately page 215 well-to-do, and so served as a class status symbol. In contrast, saddle horses cost from £5 to £10 in 1885 Taranaki,¹⁶ and they were also cheap to feed. The 1886 census showed Taranaki as the province with New Zealand's highest horse to population ratio, at 473 per 1,000. So having a mount had no chance of serving as a status symbol. What was true of the colony in general, was even more true of Taranaki—riding horses were in common use in country and town and with all classes of the population. They were least widely used in those provinces where travel depended more on coastal shipping than on roads: Westland (with 93 per 1,000), Nelson (257), Auckland (282). Taranaki and the other provinces with high horse to population ratios—e.g. Marlborough (458 per thousand) and Hawke's Bay (450)—had this in common: their coasters could do little to help with local travel.