24/03/2026
A Black Seminole woman in 1870s Texas invented her own method of horse training that was gentler than anything the men used.
She put on the clothes that needed washing.
That was how it started every time. Before Johanna July led a wild horse into the Rio Grande, before she grabbed a fistful of mane and waited for the current to do what ropes and fear could not, she gathered up her dirty laundry and put it on her body.
It was practical, if you think about it. She was going into a river anyway.
The clothes would get clean whether or not the horse cooperated. But if you sit with that detail longer than a moment, you start to see the whole shape of her life inside it.
Every man who broke horses in South Texas in the 1870s did it the same way. They roped the animal, threw it to the ground, tied its legs, and forced a saddle on its back while it screamed and thrashed.
It was violent, dangerous work that often injured both horse and rider. It was the only method anyone knew, or at least the only method anyone respected.
Johanna invented something else entirely. She would lead the horse to the river's edge, pull it into deep water, and swim beside it.
The horse had no ground to buck against, no dirt to plant its hooves in. All it had was the current, and the quiet presence of a woman who was not trying to hurt it.
As the animal tired from swimming, she eased herself onto its back. By the time they reached the shore, the horse trusted her, not because she had broken it, but because she had waited.
She was born around October of 1860, in a settlement near Nacimiento, in the Mexican state of Coahuila. The village's full name was Nacimiento de los Negros, which translates to "Birth of the Black People."
It was not a name given in cruelty. It was a name given in fact.
Her people, the Black Seminoles, had traveled an almost impossible distance to arrive there. Their ancestors had escaped enslavement in Georgia and the Carolinas, fled south into Spanish Florida, and built free communities alongside the Seminole Indians.
They fought three wars against the United States to keep that freedom. They lost.
Forced onto reservations in Indian Territory, they faced a new threat. The Creek Nation began capturing Black Seminoles and selling them back into slavery in Arkansas and Louisiana.
In 1849, a leader named John Horse, along with the Seminole chief Wild Cat, led more than three hundred men, women, and children across the whole of Texas and into Mexico.
The Mexican government, which had abolished slavery in 1829, granted them seventy thousand acres near the border in exchange for defending the northern frontier against Comanche and Apache raids.
That was the world Johanna was born into. Exile that felt like freedom, a home that existed only because every other home had been stolen.
Her father was Ned Phillips, a Black Seminole who had served in the Mexican militia and would later enlist as a U.S. Army scout. Her mother was Jennie Bruner, and her brother was Joseph.
In 1870, the U.S. Army sent word to the Black Seminoles: come back across the border, serve as scouts, and we will give you land and citizenship. It was a lie, though nobody knew that yet.
The land was never granted. The citizenship was never honored.
But in 1871, the family crossed the Rio Grande anyway, settling near Fort Duncan outside Eagle Pass, Texas. Her father broke horses for the Army, farmed, and raised livestock between brief military enlistments.
Johanna watched him work. She watched everything about the horses.
Black Seminole culture had firm ideas about what women did and what men did. Women tended the house, and men tended the livestock.
Johanna did not argue with this arrangement. She simply ignored it.
An old Seminole scout named Adam Wilson taught her to ride. Not sidesaddle, not with a proper saddle at all, but ba****ck, with nothing but a rope looped around the horse's neck.
She wore bright homespun dresses she sewed herself and thick braids that hung past her shoulders. Long gold earrings caught the border sun as she rode, always barefoot, even on horseback.
Her parents let her do it. In a community with rigid gender roles, in a family that had crossed nations to survive, they looked at their daughter riding ba****ck through the brush country and they did not stop her.
When Ned Phillips was discharged from the Army for the last time in 1872, he died shortly after. Johanna was barely a teenager.
Her brother Joseph moved away. And suddenly the family's livestock, the goats, the cattle, the horses, all of it fell to a barefoot girl in gold earrings.
She did not just maintain what her father had built. Ranchers and Army officers across South Texas began seeking her out specifically, and she became known throughout the border country as the woman who could gentle the wildest mustang without breaking its spirit.
Every time, the ritual was the same. She gathered her dirty clothes, pulled them on, walked the horse to the river, and stepped into the water.
Years later, when she was in her seventies, she described the method herself to a woman named Florence Angermiller, who had come to interview her for the Federal Writers' Project. Her exact words survive in the Library of Congress.
She said she would pull off her regular clothes, put on the ones she intended to wash, and lead the horse right into the Rio Grande. She kept the animal in the water until it got, as she put it, "pretty well worried," and then she climbed on.
She told Angermiller something else, too. She said, "I could break a hoss myself, me and my Lawd."
That was Johanna. No bravado, no performance, just her, the river, the horse, and her God.
When she was about eighteen, she married an Army scout named Carolina July. They moved to Fort Clark, another Black Seminole community along the Rio Grande, and immediately the life she had built outdoors collided with the life she was expected to build indoors.
She burned the beans. She cut fabric wrong for sewing.
She had spent her whole life with horses, not with household work, and the gap showed in every meal and every seam. Carolina responded to her difficulties with his fists.
One night, after another argument turned violent, Johanna did something that tells you everything you need to know about the kind of woman she was. She slipped out of the house, went to a neighbor's property, took a horse that was not hers, and rode through the dark all the way back to her mother at Fort Duncan.
She did not ask permission. She stole a horse and left.
Carolina July tried to find her after that. According to accounts passed down through the family, he tried to capture her, even tried to kill her, multiple times, but she eluded him every time.
He died in 1884, and whatever claim he believed he had over her died with him. Johanna had already moved on.
After 1880, she married a man named Alexander Wilkes. With him she had four children.
By 1900, she was widowed again. In 1909, she married Charles Lasley, and together they built a business raising cattle, breaking horses, and selling hides.
Charles died in 1925, and Johanna kept working. Three marriages, four children, decades of labor, and through all of it, the constant was the river and the horses.
Around 1910, she had moved to Brackettville, where she lived in a small house on a hilltop near the Seminole Cemetery. Family members from those years remember her as the old lady who still rode sidesaddle and still went barefoot around the house.
By 1940, she lived on Rufford Street, next to her granddaughter Ora Mae. The hilltop and the horses and the barefoot walks were still part of every day.
In 1937, when Florence Angermiller arrived to interview her, Johanna was in her late seventies. The interview was part of a New Deal program documenting the lives of aging Americans, and it is one of the few records that preserves Johanna's own voice.
Angermiller also arranged for a photograph. It still exists in the Library of Congress.
But the caption reads "Johanna Lesley, ex-slave, Brackettville." Johanna July was never enslaved.
Not one day of her life. She was born in a free settlement in Mexico, the daughter of people who had crossed an entire continent to ensure that no one in their family would ever be property.
And still, in 1937, a government photographer looked at a Black woman in Texas and wrote "ex-slave" without a second thought. That mislabel is its own kind of history, telling you what this country did with Black freedom, how quickly it was erased, reclassified, made to disappear into a caption.
Johanna died on January 18, 1942, in Brackettville. Her death certificate listed her name as "Joanna Phillips Lasely," a combination of her father's surname and her last husband's, and she was buried in the Seminole Indian Scouts Cemetery.
That is the same ground where four Medal of Honor recipients rest. The same ground where the people who were promised land and citizenship and given neither are laid to rest for good.
Her gravestone does not mention the Rio Grande. It does not mention the horses, or the gold earrings, or the night she stole a horse and rode away from a man who thought he owned her.
It does not mention the clothes that needed washing. But the clothes are what I keep thinking about.
She took the thing that was supposed to mark her as domestic, the thing women were expected to spend their days doing, and she carried it into the river. She folded it into the work she actually loved, the work that made her reputation, the work that nobody else was doing the way she did it.
The laundry got clean. The horse got trained.
And Johanna July walked out of the Rio Grande with both. That is not a metaphor.
That is what she actually did, every single time. She found a way to hold two lives in one body, the life the world assigned her and the life she chose, and she carried them both through the current without drowning.
She did it barefoot, in a dress she sewed herself, in gold earrings that caught the light as the water ran down her braids. And she did it so well that more than a hundred and sixty years later, we are still talking about the woman who gentled horses by swimming with them in the river.
The clothes that needed washing. That is the whole story, if you know how to read it.
I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you’d like to support the work, here’s the link:
https://ko-fi.com/blackhistorystories
Every coffee helps me keep creating.
