Vintage Pulp | Mar 14 2011 |
Above, a great cover depicting the Native American Ogala Lakota leader Crazy Horse in full headdress for Real West, July 1962, with art by the single-named Colrus. Inside are stories featuring the Dalton Brothers, Sitting Bull, and Oliver Winchester. It should be noted about this cover that the representation of Crazy Horse is necessarily fanciful because he managed to avoid ever being photographed. There is one shot purported to be of the great warrior, but it’s highly doubtful for many reasons, not least of which is that he would not have stood still for it. Get more info on this issue of Real West here.
Vintage Pulp | Nov 11 2009 |
We don’t have much information about Real West magazine, but we know it first published in late 1957, starting as a quarterly and reaching monthly status by 1973. Unfortunately, that year was its zenith and in 1974 it printed eleven times, in 1975 nine times, and so forth until it finally died in 1988. This issue with its great blizzard cover depicting the struggles of the Donner Party was published in November 1975. If your frontier history is rusty, the Donner Party was a group of settlers who had trouble crossing the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846-1847, and sent a smaller party of fifteen for help. That group—ten men and five women—became snowbound and ended up cannibalizing each other. Two men and all five women survived, which proves how effective a disapproving look and dripping disdain can be against guys who happen to be entertaining unsavory ideas. Ladies take note: “Oh, hell no. You better not be looking at me. What? You’re starving? Then eat one of your useless friends. You hang out with them all the damn time, anyway. You want to cannibalize me you should have thought about that when you were partying with your boys all night, leaving me wondering if you were even coming home. Now you’re all like, ‘But baby I need you.’ Uhn uh. Get out of my face. And take that axe with you.”