Riverside Park overlooks the historic Neosho Crossing of the Old Indian Trail between Missouri and the Osage buffalo hunting grounds in central Oklahoma, with the ford located about eighty yards above the present dam. On September 17, 1861, two hundred Union soldiers of the 6th Kansas Cavalry from Fort Scott, Kansas, under Colonel J.G. Blunt, gathered at this ford to rest their horses and plan their raid on John Mathews' trading post nine blocks south. After the Civil War, the Osages sold the east twenty-five miles of their Kansas reservation to the government, and David Branson purchased the patent to the tract that comprises this park for $1.25 per acre. The landscape then lay neglected for nearly twenty years as scrub oak and brush flourished and turned it into useless wilderness. About 1885, eighty Oswego housewives organized the Ladies Entertainment Society of Oswego, bought these twenty-six acres for $900.00 through food sales and ice cream socials, and pursued their goal of developing the bluff area into a park and one of the beauty spots of Kansas. In 1901, the society deeded the park to the City of Oswego.