Velma Bronn Johnston

Personal life

Velma Bronn was born in Reno, Nevada to Joseph Bronn and his wife Gertrude Clay and grew up on the family’s "Lazy Heart Ranch". In 1923 she contracted polio and was confined to a cast for six months. She married Charles Johnston and they took over operation of the ranch and later turning it into the "Double Lazy Heart Ranch", a dude ranch for children. The name of the ranch was changed so as to include Charles in the family business. Johnston also worked as a secretary for an insurance company.

Fight for humane treatment of free-roaming horses

Driving to work one day, in 1950 Johnston was following a truck overcrowded with horses and saw blood dripping from the back. She followed it to a slaughterhouse and upon learning they were free-roaming horses gathered from private and state lands in Nevada's Virginia Range she took action to ensure more humane treatment of free-roaming horses when captured and transported.

On her initiative and Nevada State Senator James Slattery's actions, Nevada passed a bill that made free-roaming roundups by planes and cars illegal on state and private lands. Although the free-roaming horses on all lands in the State were under the jurisdiction of the State estray laws, Federal lands, administered chiefly by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, which comprise almost 85% of the lands in Nevada were exempt from the law due to objections from the agencies that the law would hamper attempts to remove the horses from the federal lands. As large parts of Nevada were thereby excluded from the bill, Johnston continued to fight for protection of the free-roaming horses throughout the state and across all the federal lands in the west. She initiated a massive letter writing campaign by students to Senators and Congressmen. On September 8, 1959, the campaign resulted in the federal legislature passing Public Law 86-234 which banned air and land vehicles from hunting and capturing free-roaming horses on federal land. This became known as the Wild Horse Annie Act.

Passage of the Wild Horse Annie Act did not alleviate the concerns of free-roaming horse advocates, who continued to lobby for federal rather than state control over the disposition of free-roaming horses. Since most horses in the desert regions recently descended from rancher's horses, ownership of the free-roaming herds was contentious, and ranchers continued to use airplanes to gather themJohnston continued her campaign and in 1971, the 92nd United States Congress unanimously passed the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. It was signed into law by the then President Richard Nixon on December 15, 1971. This act prohibited capture, injury, or disturbance of free-roaming horses and burros.

Legacy

In 1959, Johnston was featured in Time magazine. The 1961 Western The Misfits on a script by Arthur Miller, last film of Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe and also starring Montgomery Clift, portrayed a horse roundup just outside Reno and in the way against which Johnston had protested; in the film, Monroe's character becomes disgusted with the method, which leads to a climactic clash between the characters.

Johnston herself appeared in the Robert McCahon's 1973 Western Running Wild as herself, starring alongside Lloyd Bridges and Dina Merrill.

Johnston died at age sixty-five of lung cancer in Reno, Nevada on June 27, 1977. She is buried alongside her parents, husband and brother in the Mountain View Cemetery in Reno, NV.