On July 4th, 1842, Caroline Quarlls left family, friends, and the only life she’d known behind in St. Louis, Missouri. As the child of a slave mother and a slave owner father, her young
life was one of drudgery and obedience until that fateful Independence Day when she illegally took a steamboat across the Mississippi River from St. Louis to Alton, Illinois, in the hope of
reaching freedom. With the help of abolitionists, the sixteen-year-old traveled through Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan on what has become known as the Underground Railroad. Each
step of the way, Quarlls was pursued by lawyers paid to retrieve her and bounty hunters greedy for the reward money. She took cover in uncomfortable places from barrels to potato chutes to
fields and endured long, bumpy rides in the bottom of a wagon. Finally, she crossed from Detroit into Sandwich, Canada. But that was just the beginning. In Canada, Caroline created a new
life as a free woman, which was an exciting, but also frightening, experience. Caroline’s story gives young readers a personal snapshot of the tension-filled journey of a runaway slave in
1842 and illuminates a segment of the complicated history of race in our nation.
