Harriet Tubman

     When she was about twenty-five she ran away leaving parents, brothers and sisters behind. Two brothers started out with her but became frightened and went back. Perhaps to prevent this from ever happening again, Harriet Tubman carried a pistol on her freedom forays and if any slave heading north in her parties faltered, she drew her gun and said, "You'll be free or die! " Strength to go on was always forthcoming.

     Up creek beds, through swamps, over hills in the dark of night, on nineteen secret trips into the dangerous South, Harriet Tubman guided more than three hundred slaves to freedom including her aged parents. Once in 1851, she took a party of eleven all the way to Canada, since the Fugitive Slave Act had by then made it dangerous to stop short of the border. One slave in the party, on whose head was a $1,500 reward, was so frightened he would not say a word, nor on the train crossing from Buffalo, even look out the window at the scenery. But when he found himself on free soil, he sang and shouted so much no one could shut him up. Harriet Tubman said, " You old fool, you! You might at least have looked at Niagara Falls on the way to freedom!"

     Friendless and without work in Canada, Harriet herself prayed, cooked and begged for these refugees all winter. Then, in the spring, she went back South to free more. She went alone, but once she got her slaves started, Harriet had help. There were secret stations of the Underground Railroad from Wilmington, Delaware, to the Great Lakes--hiding places in barns, cellars, churches, woodsheds, caves--and White friends to help with food and warm clothing and wagons with false bottoms for long trips in harsh weather. Harriet Tubman, one of the most famous "conductors" on the Underground Railroad, once said, "I nebber run my train off de track, and I nebber lost a passenger. "