Humorous novel set in Riverbank, a fictionalized Muscatine, in a Mississippi River town. Pastor David Dean and his wife take up residence in this town, Iowa in the 1850s and learn how unaccepting a small town can be of new residents, even after a stay of decades. An interesting social history of mid nineteenth century life, emphasizing the dominance of crass commercial interests in the vicissitudes of small town life, written by an American author Ellis Parker Butler. He was the author of more than 30 books and more than 2,000 stories and essays and is most famous for his short story Pigs Is Pigs, in which a bureaucratic stationmaster insists on levying the livestock rate for a shipment of two pet guinea pigs, which soon start proliferating geometrically.