I gave this fascinating, fast-pace biography four out of five stars. One reason the book rates such high marks is that it points up a very large and telling blind spot in both the received history of the Old West and in the American myth of the cowboy hero.

Who, other than devotees of the Old West, knew that Wyatt Earp had a wife, a voluptuous little woman of Jewish ancestry from New York City, who was his constant companion for nearly 50 years?

In the usual telling of history and legend, the cowboy hero will have his dalliances, but the narrative usually ends with the hero riding off into the sunset, leaving behind the little woman and the settled, quotidian world she is given to represent.

Mrs. Josephine Earp, née Marcus, amends that narrative, correcting its myopia, and making it more consonant with life. Somewhat swarthy, doe-eyed, and a little over 5 feet tall, Josephine had a figure that prompted a family friend to remark: “Her bosoms came in the front door before her body did.”

Yet she was as much an adept of the frontier and high-stakes adventurer as her man. Indeed, she seems to have been an early instantiation of Walt Whitman’s prophecy that America would engender “a new race of hardy and well-defined women" as free, dauntless, and capable as its men.

Believing as ardently as Wyatt Earp that anyone with enough drive, grit, and guile could strike it rich on the frontier, Josephine “Sadie" Earp tramped along with him from boom town to boom town, a trail winding from Tombstone, Arizona, north to Nome, Alaska and points in between, back to the lower 48, and on to Hollywood, boom town of the then burgeoning industry of the “talkies.“

For them, life was a gamble that favored big bets. More than once, they actually did strike it rich, rich enough to have been set for life, but they acted as if an even bigger jackpot awaited them just over the horizon. That is the way they lived until old age and the closing of the frontier fenced them in.

Remarkably, her relative obscurity is not entirely attributable to male chauvinism. Both she and Wyatt had secrets that would have come tumbling out of the past if ever she permitted herself to step into the limelight of his life.

Her reaction was to falsify or negate her own existence and every other perceived threat to the “nice clean story” she wanted told. In that regard, Josephine recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fictional character, Jay Gatsby, who, like her, was unpersuaded that the past could not be changed.