MORE MOUNTIES IN THE PULPS

MORE MOUNTIESIN THE PULPS Mush Or Die While North-West Romance was the vanguard of the Northwestern genre, many other pulps, including leading titles such as Argosy, Adventure, and Short-Stories, published exciting yarns of mounties and the Yukon.

They even occasionally featured a scarlet-coated mountie on their covers. The stories in several pulps such as Complete Northwest Novel, Complete Northwest, and Real Northwest Adventures, were exclusively Northwesterns, but none had the longevity or achieved the popularity of North-West Romance.


James B. Hendryx is perhaps best remembered for his Halfaday Creek stories featuring Black John—a rugged, roguish, grizzled man with a frontiersman’s sense of sudden justice and gentle humor. Hendryx also created Corporal Cameron Downey of the RCMP, who appeared in a series of tales in Short Stories. 


Argosy and Adventure were among the top paying pulp markets. Their focus was High Adventure, a genre broad enough to make room for Northwesterns. 


Argosy favored stories about a mountie named no-shirt McGee in such tales as Red Coat, White Feather and When the River Ran White. Adventure could boast stories from pulp regular Gorges Surdez like Man At Arms with its hero, the toughest looking mountie ever illustrated on the cover.


Top-Notch was a middle tier pulp along with Thrilling Adventures, but both regularly featured Northwesterns in their story lineups and on their covers.


Pulps such a Railroad Stories and Popular Radio, which would appear to have a different genre agenda glance appear occasionally featured a Northwestern story on their cover. Even prestigious slicks like The Saturday Evening Post and the clean cut youth oriented American Boy got in on the act.


Comics were not going to be left out either. Along with Dell publishing's mainstream comics Zane Grey's King Of The Royal Mounted and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon (both featured in previous posts), other smaller comic companies produced cut rate tales labeled with generic titles–such as Northwest Mounties–and with heroes in scarlet tunics emblazoned on their covers to pull readers in.


Beyond the pulps and comics, mounties also appeared prominently in books and movies, which deserve posts of their own.