Team #764 Montie Eagle and Marshall
Team #764: Montie Eagle and Marshall
From: Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Ages: 77 & 23
Combined Age: 100
Test: First Level Test 2
Montie Eagle is the author of The Rose in Prime and the soon-to-be-published “Riding Anyone? The Starter Rider’s Handbook of Horsemanship.”
“Opportunities were limited in New York City where I grew up.” She constantly read books about horses and was enthralled whenever she could get near a real horse. Riding lessons were treasured occasions.
Montie was fortunate to have excellent riding teachers throughout her life and worked hard to learn. She studied classical dressage since 1984, working with Pat Smeltzer and Pat’s mentor, Karl Mikolka.
She also learned groundwork and the use of the round pen from a horseman who had studied John Lyons’ techniques. In 2006 she audited a Western Dressage clinic given by Jack Brainard and was greatly surprised to find out this trainer of reining horse champions cued his horses from their footfalls, just as Karl had taught her. She rode in several clinics with Jack, who was her mentor for fifteen years until he died in 2021.
“Working with the best of both classical dressage and western riding made me want to seek out the underlying principles of all the valid lines of thought I had experienced in decades of learning. What were the ideas and truths all these great horsemen trained by and taught?”
With limited finances throughout her life, she bought the horses she could and trained what she had. Her current dressage horse was a former track outrider’s horse.
Montie has been a guest clinician at the Horse World Expo several times since 2005.
