In October 1856, Harriet Tubman organized what Tubman scholars consider one of her most complicated and clever escape attempts after a fiancé who had escaped to Canada asked her to help a slave named Tilly in Baltimore. Judging a steamship voyage to Philadelphia too dangerous and expensive, Tubman chose instead to travel with Tilly by steamboat to Seaford, going south down the Chesapeake Bay and then up the Nanticoke River. After landing, most likely at the present-day Riverwalk, the two spent the night at a hotel atop the hill where Gateway Park now stands. The next morning they were nearly arrested by slave traders, but accounts say the hotel landlord intervened on their behalf. Using Tubman's letter of passage identifying her as a free African American woman from Philadelphia, they secured passes and traveled north by train to Camden and then by carriage to Thomas Garrett in Wilmington. Garrett, a prominent abolitionist and Underground Railroad leader, recorded the episode in a letter dated October 27, 1856, to Eliza Wigham in Scotland, calling it a remarkable journey that showed great shrewdness. Tilly's story is the only documented escape led by Harriet Tubman at the headwaters of the Nanticoke, along the border of Tubman's home county of Dorchester, Maryland.