THE PULP CALENDAR: October 5

Street & Smith made an interesting decision to give one 1940 Western Story cover to a nonfiction piece. 1940 was the 400th anniversary of Coronado's exploration of the future American west, and while many events commemorated his historic trek, there's no special significance that I know of to October 5 or the entire month in that narrative. Maybe the editor had been waiting for R. Edgar Moore to deliver his ten-page piece on the subject. Moore is credited with only nine stories in the FictionMags Index, and his Coronado piece is the last of them. The real pulp fan probably would have been more excited to have a Luke Short serial, Gunsmoke Graze, begin in this issue. Short is joined by a bunch of familiar faces: Harry F. Olmsted, Harry Sinclar Drago, Seth "Frank Richardson Pierce" Ranger, Bennett Foster, George Cory Franklin and pulp poet S. Omar Barker. A conquistador may have been an unusual sight up front, but otherwise Western Story regulars could be pretty sure of what they were getting.