"The First Mayor"

• First appeared in Atlantic Monthly, LXIV (November 1889 (pp. 611-27). Reprinted in Otto the Knight (1891). 
• Only mentioned in McMichael on page 125 as part of Otto, but also he reprints from a letter by Alice French to Horace Scudder, July 31, 1890 (part of the Harvard College Library collection):  "I'm afraid there is a load of dialect in the stories written before I tried to reduce my dialect to the smallest proportions as I do now. . ./ Should we include other stories, there are two courses open. We might call the book 'Old and New Poor Folks,' and add two stories of the time of Edward VI. . .or we might add, instead, (a more feasible scheme, I fancy) three Western Stories, The Governor's Prerogative, The Day of the Cyclone, and The First Mayor. I will send you the stories tomorrow and you can judge for yourself about their value. / Were the book only about Arkansas, I should call it By the Cypress Swamp; but if we mix it up with the West, that won't do."

Basic summary: This is the story of Atherton--both the Western town and the man it was named for. Katy and Tom Ransome, young lovers who married despite family objections, are lured to Atherton for Tom to become the editor of the paper, The Citizen. Once there, they meet Atherton--the first mayor of the town, his wife (the widow Bainbridge and her daughter), and Renee, the Louisiana native who also followed the Westward expansion.

Initially, Katy is put off by Atherton, but the more she learns about him, the more she likes him. Over and over again he puts himself at risk to help others--first, it is the man who confronts him for putting him out of business. We learn later that he hired the man at a salary higher than he ever made when running the business, though, and that the business failing was a blessing. After his wife and children died of Cholera, he married the widow Bainbridge who was destitute after her own husband died. Her daughter Rose tried to stab Atherton with a penknife on their wedding day, but he was later her friend.

Atherton has gone so far as to guarantee currency, and when the bank goes bust, he is elected out of office. His wife dies in a carriage accident, and he winds up having a fit of apoplexy. Katy and Tom move, and when they return ten years later, the town has been renamed and it is only by finding the monument Atherton had built for his first wife and three lost children that they realize they've found his grave, as well.

Items of note: 

• Mrs. Atherton mentions early on that her husband hopes to attract Germans to the area as they will remake the town. "The Governor's Prerogative" in this same collection also focuses on German immigrants.
• Early in the story, there is mention of the railroad passing Atherton by; this is also mentioned in the story "Trusty, No. 49." Instead of Germans coming to save the town in that story, however, it is Thornton, the Northerner who plans to open a cannery in Lawrence County that is seen as the great hope.
• Katy assumes that there is duty rather than love between the Athertons. When Miss Bainbridge tells how her stepfather saved her life and her mother's by marrying Mrs. Atherton, Katy assumes there's no love there, but only obligation.