Johanna July was a Black Seminole, born around 1857 in a place called Nacimiento de Los Negros in northern Mexico. Her family was made up of Seminole Indians and former enslaved African Americans who had left Florida and settled in Mexico after the Seminole War ended in 1842. They had moved there when many Seminole Indians and Black Seminoles left the U.S. and moved to northern Mexico in 1849.
In 1870, the U.S. Army needed help from people who knew the border area, so they hired Black Seminoles as translators and scouts. This led to many of them, including Johanna’s family, returning to the United States. They settled in or near Eagle Pass, Texas, in 1871. Johanna learned how to train wild horses and help herd the family’s goats and cattle. After her father died, Johanna continued working with the stock and trained horses for the U.S. Army and local ranchers.
Johanna had her own special way of training horses. She would take a horse into the Rio Grande River, swim with it, grab its mane, and gently climb onto its back. As the horse tired from swimming, it would lose the strength to buck.
Johanna was remembered as a tall, barefoot girl who wore bright dresses made from homemade fabric. She had her hair in thick braids and wore long gold earrings and necklaces. She married a man named Lesley, and the couple moved to another Black Seminole community near the Rio Grande at Fort Clark, Texas. However, her new life wasn’t easy. Johanna wasn’t used to doing household chores, and she struggled with things like burning beans and cutting fabric wrong. Her husband didn’t handle her struggles well and became violent. Eventually, Johanna left him and rode her pony to Fort Duncan, Texas.
As Johanna got older, not much in her life changed. After her first husband died, she married two more times but kept working with horses and cattle. Around 1910, Johanna moved to Brackettville, Texas, where she lived in a small house on a hill near the cemetery. Family members remembered her as an old lady who rode sidesaddle and walked around barefoot at home. She passed away shortly after World War II and is buried in the Brackettville Seminole Cemetery.
