Mistake Corrected

Last summer I found an aspen carving that had me stumped.  If my reader was paying attention, it seemed that I had discovered evidence of (potentially) an American visitor to the Markagunt in 1819.  This would have predated William Ashley, and many of the men he made famous, such as Jed Smith, who could not have been near the plateau prior to 1820 or so.  I was thinking a lot about the problem this week, and decided that I needed better data:  Tree age data for one.  So I went out there today to collect it.  I immediately discovered that I had simply made a mistake.  The date—1819—which seemed so clear, and so uniform, is actually composed of six digits, not four.  Here they are:  181903.  The 18 is the day of the month.  The year is 1903.  I see it now, and it seems obvious.  Unfortunately, while 1819 was too early for Ashley or Smith, 1903 was much too late:  They were both gone by 1840.