For nearly 50 years Josephine Marcus Earp was the common-law wife of Wyatt Earp, the legendary hero of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. As an independent 19th-century woman she was a real-life forerunner of True Grit’s fictional Mattie Ross.

Author Ann Kirschner explores the life of this frontier femme, a flamboyant Jewish girl with a persistent New York accent whose life is a spirited and colorful tale of ambition, adventure, self-invention, and romance.

Ann Kirschner is University Dean of Macaulay Honors College at The City University of New York. She is the author of Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story.