I have to agree with Terrell on this one. The book is a novel, and Twain uses poetic license (even though he had Huck comment on the absurdity of Jim running South to get free). Yes, Twain would have known that Ohio was a good destination for escaping slaves, and there were cases of slaves escaping by steamboat up the Ohio River. But to do so, a slave would have needed money, a protector, and--usually--savvy about the steamboat trade. Jim finds in Huck the protector, but the other elements are missing, and Huck is not a particularly good protector; not a seasoned conductor on the underground railroad, at any rate. And yes, Illinois was not friendly ground for fugitive slaves. But Iowa was just a hop-skip and a jump from "St. Peterburg," and it was one of the most energetically anti-slavery states in the Union--as "Twain" would have known from his own brief time living there with his brother. How much easier, if Jim wished to pay for boat passage in Huck's company, to convince Huck to go north on the Mississippi to Iowa. It's as plausible as Jim's plan of catching a boat to run up the Ohio. (Isn't it an amusing game to re-plot the life of a fictional being?) So a more logical plot could have been fashioned if it were really Jim's story. But the book is, after all, _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_. Twain wanted Huck to go South. Do you think a man who, as he says in his autobiography, would "move a state if the exigencies of literature required it" (Chapter XIII) would scruple at a little thing like having Jim go South to the Ohio in order to catch a Steamboat northeast? All it would take is marginal plausibility and brass. Twain had the brass. Gregg