Steve, you might want to look at Harriet Frazier's book: Runaway and Freed Missouri Slaves and Those Who Helped Them, 1763 - 1865 and my own book: Searching for Jim, Slavery in Sam Clemens's World. They will give you some notion of what slaves who ran away in Missouri actually did. Southern Illinois was a hotbed of pro-slavery sentiment as evidenced by the county results on the black code issues that came before the voters and the thicket of slave-catchers. You might want to review Illinois history as well. (I can't put my hands on the book I want to refer you to on slavery and Illinois. I'll contact you when it comes to me.) Cairo would never have been a destination for a slave from Northern Missouri unless he was hired onto on a steamboat and Cairo was his northern-most and only opportunity. The Ohio and the Mississippi were heavily patrolled. To use a cold-war analogy, escaping by going south on the Mississippi and going all the way down to Cairo and then up the Ohio would have been the same as escaping from the northern part of East Germany by getting right next to the fence and walking to Czechoslovakia before attempting to cross to the west. You would have to go by several hundred guard towers instead of just one. Sheer folly. There were some slaves who floated by raft down the Missouri and to Illinois, but it happened late during the Civil War when the slave patrol system had gone completely to pot and eastern troops frequently aided runaways. I have been studying original slave material on Missouri now for seven years and have not encountered a single case where anyone ever escaped by such a method. It is also inconsistent with the methods that we do know about. Could someone do it? Of course. Would someone do it? Not in the real world. How is that a criticism of Huck Finn? It is a novel. Terrell Dempsey