A woman in the 1850's must give up her children since her husband's murder on a Riverboat, so she cuts off her hair, changes into men's clothes and spends twelve years dressed as a man, looking for her husband's killer, who she finds twice.

SYNOPSIS:

In the early morning of the 1850’s, along-side the Missouri River, a rope ladder is thrown out the second story of a Boarding School and Jane slides down to the ground, collects her things and runs off to meet her future husband and Riverboat Pilot. Jane’s childhood dreams come true as her husband finds them a home and in that home, they bring two children into the chaos of the Western Frontier of early America.

The utopian beginning of Jane’s life is followed almost immediately with tragedy in the form of her husband’s death at the hands of a gambler named Jamieson. Jane is only fifteen years old and she is shattered.

She is forced to give up her children to The Sisters of Mercy since she has no income, and the house is sold for what is owed. She turns to one of her husband’s older friends who supports her in every way including hiring a private barber to come to his home and cut off her hair. He buys her a man’s suit and watches her as she puts a knife in her boot and turns to him as Charley, a name she was called by in the gold fields of Colorado and California, later in her life.

Jane was sick with revenge. She gave up her children and humiliated herself in men’s clothes for twelve years as she roamed across the country looking for Jamieson who she found twice, shot twice and who ultimately died in a prison waiting to go to trial for killing Janes’ husband.

She called herself Charley for which she finally became a legend. Jane worked at many, many different jobs to keep herself alive. She was a Cabin Boy on a ship, she worked for the Railroad, she purchased and ran a bar in Denver, Colorado on Cherry Street but her greatest luck came as Charley who supplied the men in the ‘gold fields’, with food, shelter, clothes, goods and mining equipment which she delivered herself in wagon trains and mule trains. She headed a wagon train once from Colorado to California and as Charley – she was the only woman (unknown to any) among sixty men, their chattel and their cattle.

In her bar in downtown Denver, she met a man named Guerin and had the romance of her life until they were married. He was her bartender, and she was the woman he had waited for all his life.

Jane was interviewed by Horace Greeley from the New York Times, and she was famous in the gold fields of Colorado where her legend grew even greater from the care, she gave to sick and down-and-out miners. In the period of time, she was looking for Jamieson, she crisscrossed the countryside and became an educated traveler even passing through the Panama Canal on a sailing ship. In the end, Jane goes out to the desert and buries her male attire along with her knife and guns. She puts back on her female clothes, retrieves her children from the Sisters and lives the life of a celebrity with her husband and family until she died of old age.

This is an epic, action/adventure style story coupled with an old fashion romance and the true story of a woman who survived in a man's world when the world was men - fighting and scratching an existence from the ground up in the old West when the end of the collected United States stopped at Deadwood. This is also a story about revenge and how it changes you, absorbs your life and creates a chaos around you that could eventually tear your world apart. Jane escapes that kind of revenge and finds a more peaceful pathway to the end of her life, a pathway that many in the modern world would find quiet and satisfying as the end to their own personal stories of today.

JANE, THE LEGEND OF MOUNTAIN CHARLEY