I found this post which got me going:
https://rohankapoor.com/2012/04/americanizing-the-raspberry-pi/
I'm assuming this was written from an older version of Raspbian because there's a few differences from what I saw. Regardless, it works and has nice screen shots.
Here's the text cliff notes:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
cursor to your selection (en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 for me) and press space bar to select. Tab to highlight then Enter
Next select default locale (en_US.UTF-8 for me again)
sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-reconfiguration
(default "Generic 106-key (Intl) PC for me) Tab to and enter
Next screen is keyboard layout (Selected English (US) )
Next screen is AltGr selection. (I picked No AltGr key )
Next screen is Compose key. (I picked No compose key)
And I'm back at a command prompt
sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
First screen geographic area (I picked America)
Next is city or region (I picked New York)
Finally a reboot with
sudo reboot
Boom, I can type a pipe character !!! |||
Note, you can also access these screens from:
sudo raspi-config
Then pick 4 Localisation options
There's a lot of other interesting bits also.
Some have pointed out that this is more than what is needed to get the keyboard locale reconfigured. That is correct but most likely anyone having this issue will need to set these other items as well for a complete solution. If they've already done the other steps then it'll be easy to skip them.