Cowboy Dressage. Jessica Black
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Lee Folino/Inner Vision Images (p. 4)
Debby Zarate (p. 22)
Jessica Black (p. 33 left)
Dayton Photography/Dora Grund (p. 44 left)
Avalon Equine (p. 50)
Gerardo Martin Martinez (p. 117)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (p. 141)
Pepe Martin p. 146
Don Moats (p. 161 top left)
Lisbeth Poppel (p. 161 bottom left and right)
Tessa Baumann (p. 162 top left and right)
Mark Bruin (p. 162 bottom left and right)
PREFACE
1945, Rishon LeZion, British Mandate of Palestine
The story of Cowboy Dressage® began at the side of a grave, as five-year-old Eitan Beth-Halachmy stood solemnly at his mother’s funeral, the youngest mourner, trying hard to look anywhere but at the coffin. Everything was dry, dusty, and bleak, the graveyard a sandy expanse between the orange groves, the people formal and grieving. Out of the corner of his eye, the boy spotted a tall, bearded sheriff, standing under a eucalyptus tree beside his horse, a small chestnut Arabian.
Or perhaps it was that the sheriff was large—to a small five-year old, he seemed huge. Eitan watched the sheriff—and the sheriff watched him—throughout the ceremony. As soon as the funeral ended, the sheriff came straight up to him, lifted him, and put him in the saddle. Even though Eitan had never so much as touched a horse, the sheriff let him ride by himself, guiding the little horse between the rows of trees. That was it; addiction took over his soul.
Eitan Beth-Halachmy spent his childhood dreaming of horses and his adult life connecting with them.
“It felt like flying,” Eitan remembers. For the first time, something else, a live being, was carrying him over the ground, with no effort on his part. Before that moment, he had never known a horse, and had not imagined what riding one would be like. After that first ride, young Eitan did a lot of imagining, if little riding. He spent every spare moment dreaming of horses, wrapped in an imaginary world that was born out of American cinema: the Old West, with its cowboys and cow horses, gunfighters, and Indians. It was a world impossibly far away from his own—it was a fantasy.
Eitan and Santa Fe Renegade perform at the Cowboy Dressage World Finals Show and Gathering on November, 15, 2014. In his journey from a small dusty town in the Middle East to California and then all over the United States and even abroad, Eitan Beth-Halachmy, riding many horses but in particular Santa Fe and Holiday Compadre, has shown an ever-increasing audience that you can have a passion, dream an impossible dream, and make it happen.
WHITTLED FROM WOOD
One of Eitan’s most important jobs as a youth was watching sheep. He would take a herd of 500 into the mountains of Jerusalem for 30 days at a time, carrying a gun, a knife, and not much food—primarily pasta. He would supplement the pasta with figs, almonds, and whatever he could pick from a tree; it was never much. What he lacked in food he had a surfeit of in boredom, and Eitan would fill the long hours whittling figures out of wood, nurturing a talent that would be seen later in his artistic endeavors as a wood carver and sculptor. This ability to see the potential in a nondescript chunk of wood and patiently work at it until its beauty emerged, would carry over to training rough colts and fillies and molding them until they reached their own potential.
Eitan Beth-Halachmy
Eitan—also known as “8” to his friends—was born on November 24, 1940, in Rishon LeZion, a small town south of Tel Aviv that had been cobbled together out of the sandy desert since the first Zionist movement in 1882. Although Rishon LeZion has become a city of 230,000, it had little more than 10,000 inhabitants when Israel obtained statehood in 1948. The town was dirt, dust, ducks, and donkeys when our story begins; animals were everywhere, but horses were a luxury. Donkeys and mules served as transport, carrying necessities such as kerosene. Eitan delivered goods too, including eggs and vegetables to Ben Gurion, first Prime Minister of Israel, who had worked in the town himself as a young man, at Carmel Winery’s Rishon LeZion Wine Cellars. The young Eitan also spent long hours as a shepherd; his family had lived in close connection to agriculture for generations. Eitan’s was the fifth generation of Zionists and would be the first to live in the new state of Israel as a child.
Although horses were a luxury in Rishon LeZion, Eitan’s hometown, animals were everywhere. People relied on mules and donkeys for transport; here the young Eitan hitches a mule to a delivery cart.
WESTWARD BOUND
Eitan first visited the United States in 1961 as part of a farm youth exchange. He was chosen out of 500 applicants and the main criterion was an English exam…but Eitan knew almost no English: yes, no, and that was about it, he remembers. He was shaking as he entered the interview room, but one way or another he managed to convince them he had enough English to travel to the United States. To this day, he does not know how he did it. Perhaps because he wanted to visit the land of his cowboy-filled dreams so much, Eitan somehow succeeded in communicating despite his lack of English language skills.
The miracle of his acceptance into the program was followed by the challenge of communicating once he had reached his destination, although the struggle to make himself understood brought benefits as well: On the one hand, Eitan learned to express himself with very little, using body language and expression in lieu of the words he had not yet learned. On the other hand, the experience left him with a fear of using his English in public, a language barrier that he would not conquer until late in life when the need to share his knowledge of horses overcame his reluctance to speak in front of large crowds.
Eitan Beth-Halachmy today.
Eitan was born as far away from his dream—Cowboy Dressage—as could be, on the other side of the world, across the ocean, in rural Israel (then the British territory of Palestine). For the skinny child in rubber boots and a straw hat, horses were a luxury. That first ride in the graveyard opened up a new world, but one that seemed far out of reach. As far as he knew, his family had never had anything to do with horses; still he dreamed.
He made tentative friendships with the Arabs, partly because he wanted to learn about horses from them, but despite the lore, those Arabs were poorer than the Jewish settlers were. Yes,