Cathay did not have an easy life. First her name was Cathay, which was a really old-timey way of saying China, which is kind of weird given that she was not Chinese. Second, she was black in pre-Civil War America, which pretty much most people agree was definitely not the cat's pajamas. Cathay was born to a free black man and an enslaved woman, which according to the laws in Missouri at the time, made her a slave. Cathay spent her childhood working as a house servant, seeing to the needs of the wealthy aristocratic family who owned her. When Cathay was nineteen years old the Civil War broke out, and fearing that Missouri might at any moment break away to join the Confederacy, the Union Army occupied the state. Now the casual observer of history might think that this would be a good thing for Cathay. They would be wrong. The Union Army considered captured slaves contraband, and so instead of slaving away for some rich assholes, Cathay instead was forced to slave away for a bunch of military assholes.
Over the next four years Cathay, though declared a free woman, was forced to do whatever the Union Army told her to do. Luckily for her this was mostly just cooking and laundry. Cathay marched with the army wherever they went, covering a good chunk of the country in doing so. The army couldn't seem to decide whether the slaves they freed were people or property. On one hand they did pay a wage, though a meager one, but on the other they really didn't give people like Cathay much of a choice, often transferring them to other units as though they were enlisted soldiers. This confusion ended with the Civil War. No, the army didn't decide that the former slaves were people, they just decided it wasn't their damn problem to figure it out. Cathay was left free to do whatever the hell she wanted, which unfortunately, without a job, mostly looked like starving to death.
Cathay was not the kind of person to just lay down and quit. Instead she dressed up in man clothes, changed her name to William Cathay, went to an army recruiting office, and joined one of the black only regiments that was being sent to the frontier to fight Native Americans. Being taller than many men of the era (she was five foot nine), the recruiter didn't bat an eye when he signed her up. Things were helped by the fact that the army's medical examination at the time mostly consisted of a drunk doctor giving you a cursory glance to make sure you probably wouldn't die within the next few days. With her unit Cathay traveled westward through Kansas to New Mexico to guard prospectors from the Apache. She didn't have much luck in the army. Cathay was almost immediately hospitalized for small pox and throughout her career would be hospitalized five more times for various ailments. Not one of these times did the doctors discover she was missing a penis, which really speaks to the hands off approach of 1860's medicine.
After two years in the army, mostly performing garrison duty, Cathay got sick again. The doctor, believing in new-fangled medical techniques like actually examining and touching patients, quickly discovered her secret and reported it. Cathay was soon after discharged for her definite lack of a penis, which her commanding officer reported by stating that she had always been both physically and mentally feeble. Cathay spent the next two years working as a cook for the army again, followed by twenty-one years of working as a laundress in Colorado. When her health began to fail to she applied for a military pension. The military sent out an examiner who, despite the fact all of her toes had been amputated and that she needed a crutch to get around, declared her the picture of health. Then, to be a total jerk, he casually added that it didn't matter, since only people with penises were allowed to get military pensions. Cathay died not long after.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cathay_Williams.gif