 According to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the first settlers of Osceola, which included the families of Reverend James Query and Vinson Perry Davis, arrived in October 1868.Davis is credited with naming the settlement after a city of the same name in Iowa, which had been named after Chief Osceola of the Seminole people.After three years of settlement and disputes over the permanent location, the town itself was organized by frontiersmen William Francis Kimmel and John Hopwood Mickey in the early fall of 1871.