Ever wondered how hard it was to be a woman in the Old West? Just ask Mountain Charley. Or should we say, Elsa Jane, a teenaged widow with two children in the 1840s. “I knew how great are the prejudices to be overcome by any young woman who seeks to earn an honest livelihood by her own exertions,” she'd later say. So she housed her children with the Sisters of Charity and dressed as a man.
“I buried my sex in my heart and roughened the surface so that the grave would not be discovered—a
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