11/20/2025
She broke wild horses by swimming alongside them in the Rio Grande—born in exile, Johanna July trained horses barefoot and answered to no one.
Johanna was born around 1860 in Nacimiento de los Negros, a remote settlement in northern Mexico where freedom came at the cost of everything familiar.
Her people—the Black Seminoles—were descended from escaped enslaved Africans and Seminole Indians who had built lives together in Florida, farming land and forming families.
But after the brutal Seminole Wars of the 1830s and 1840s, when the U.S. government forced Indigenous peoples westward and recaptured Black people to enslave them, the Black Seminoles fled south across the Rio Grande into Mexico.
Mexico offered them something the United States never would:
Citizenship, land, and the promise that no one would be returned to slavery.
So they built Nacimiento—a village of exiles who refused to surrender their freedom.
This was the world Johanna was born into.
A world where survival meant adaptability, where identity was layered and complex, where home was wherever you could defend it.
In 1870, the U.S. Army came calling with an offer.
They needed scouts who knew the harsh borderlands of Texas and Mexico—people who could track, translate, and navigate terrain that baffled white soldiers.
The Black Seminoles, desperate for steady income and a chance to return to U.S. territory, agreed.
In exchange for military service, they would receive land near Brackettville, Texas, and American citizenship.
In 1871, Johanna's family crossed back into the United States, settling near Fort Duncan outside Eagle Pass.
Her father, Ned Phillips, broke horses for the Army while farming and raising livestock. Her mother, Jennie Bruner, tended the household.
And Johanna? Johanna fell in love with horses.
Black Seminole culture had clear gender roles: women managed homes, men handled livestock.
But Johanna had no interest in cooking or sewing.
She wanted to be outside, working with animals, feeling the power of a thousand-pound creature learning to trust her hands.
An old Seminole scout named Adam Wilson taught her to ride.
Not sidesaddle like a "proper" lady, but ba****ck, with nothing but a rope around the horse's neck.
She wore bright homespun dresses that she sewed herself, thick braids that hung down her back, and long gold earrings and necklaces that caught the Texas sun.
She went barefoot. Always barefoot. Even when riding.
When her father died shortly after his military discharge in 1872, Johanna—still barely a teenager—took over his work.
She herded the family's goats and cattle.
And she began breaking horses for the U.S. Army and local ranchers.
But Johanna didn't break horses the way men did.
Male horse breakers used force and fear. They roped wild horses, threw them to the ground, tied their legs, and forced saddles onto their backs while the animals screamed and thrashed.
It was violent, dangerous work that often injured both horse and rider.
The goal was domination—to "break" the horse's spirit until it submitted.
Johanna invented a different method entirely.
She would lead a wild horse down to the Rio Grande.
Once in the water, she'd swim alongside the animal, letting it grow accustomed to her presence.
Then, as the horse tired from the current and the swim, she would gently grab its mane and ease herself onto its back.
The horse, exhausted and disoriented in the water, couldn't buck effectively.
By the time they reached the opposite shore, the animal had learned something crucial:
This human wasn't a predator. She was a partner.
Trust took root in that river.
And when Johanna climbed off, she had a horse who would work with her—not out of fear, but out of relationship.
Her reputation spread.
Ranchers and Army officers sought her out specifically. She became known throughout South Texas as one of the finest horse trainers on the border—a tall, barefoot Black Seminole woman who could gentle the wildest mustang without breaking its spirit.
But when Johanna was about eighteen, she made a decision that would prove more difficult than any wild horse:
She married a man named Lesley.
They moved to Fort Clark, another Black Seminole community along the Rio Grande.
And immediately, Johanna discovered that marriage was a trap she hadn't anticipated.
Lesley expected a traditional wife. Someone who could cook, sew, keep house while he worked.
Johanna tried. She genuinely tried.
But she had spent her life outdoors with animals, not indoors with pots and needles.
The domestic life suffocated her.
And when she struggled, Lesley responded with violence.
So one day, Johanna simply left.
She climbed onto her pony, rode back to Fort Duncan where her mother lived, and never returned to Lesley.
In a time when women had few legal rights, when domestic violence was considered a private family matter, when leaving a husband meant social ostracism—Johanna chose herself.
She chose the horses. She chose freedom. She chose the open land and the river and the work that made her feel alive.
Life went on.
Lesley eventually died, and Johanna married twice more—first to Alexander Wilkes, then to Charles Lasley.
With Charles, she ran a successful business raising cattle, breaking horses, and selling hides.
But the core of her life never changed.
The horses remained. The land remained. The barefoot girl who refused to be tamed remained.
Around 1910, Johanna moved to Brackettville and built herself a small house on a hilltop near the cemetery.
She lived there for the next three decades, riding into town, still barefoot, still breaking horses, still carrying herself like a woman with nothing to prove and no apologies to make.
In 1937, when Johanna was in her late seventies, a woman named Florence Angermiller came to interview her as part of the Federal Writers' Project—a New Deal program documenting the stories of formerly enslaved people and their descendants.
Angermiller recorded Johanna's voice, her memories, her river method of horse training.
That interview is one of the few records we have of Johanna's own words.
On January 18, 1942, Johanna July died in Brackettville at approximately eighty-two years old.
She was buried in the Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery alongside other Black Seminoles who had served the U.S. military, raised families in exile, and built lives in the brutal borderlands between two nations.
Her gravestone doesn't tell the full story.
It can't capture the feel of the Rio Grande's current, the weight of a horse's mane in her hands, the moment when a wild animal chose to trust her.
It doesn't mention the husband she left, the decades she spent on her own terms, the revolutionary way she trained animals through partnership instead of domination.
But her legacy endures in the stories people still tell about the barefoot Black Seminole woman who trained horses in the river, who chose freedom over safety, who proved that strength doesn't require cruelty.
Johanna July wasn't famous. She never sought recognition.
But she lived a life that was entirely her own—and in doing so, she showed what freedom actually looks like when you're brave enough to claim it.
~Old Photo Club
