Elisha Bradburn & Kylie Bartel

Elisha Bradburn

Elisha Bradburn is the founder of Legacy Horsemanship. Legacy is a word that describes building something lasting, and that is what Elisha hopes to help people do with their horses. A passion for helping people and horses is the inspiration for sharing her ideas through Legacy Horsemanship.

Elisha came upon her love of horses naturally as both her Grampa Lester Burns, who spent summers as a kid trailing cattle, and her mother, Heidi Shuster, who rode, raised and bred horses for many years definitely passed the bug on to her. Elisha’s experience with horses started when she was 5 years old and got her first pony, Gypsy. Heidi and Elisha had up to 15 horses on their farm at a time, as they bred and raised both Thoroughbred race horses for the track, and warmblood performance horses as well as stood a Dutch Warmblood stallion for many years. Elisha was Heidi’s right hand woman on the farm, sleeping in the hay loft with her on bales of hay, foaling mares out in the spring, and learning a real work ethic. Caring for horses day in and day out and watching her mom deal with everything involved in the horse business was an incredible education. Elisha initially yee-hawed around like any kid, bareback and wild on her ponies. A few tricky, untrained (and fed up) ponies refined Elisha pretty quickly.

Elisha pursued dressage, eventing, hunter jumper, and show jumping in her younger years. Elisha travelled to Belgium in 2000 and 2001 as an exercise rider/groom where she had the incredible opportunity to work in an Olympic show jumping barn for a couple of summers as a teen. Riding 8 horses a day, 12 hour days, and travelling to shows, with very few days off during her time in Europe was good experience.

Later in life Elisha was introduced to some incredible horsemen who helped shape her horsemanship immensely, including Glenn Stewart, Jonathan Field and Miles Kingdon. Meeting Miles led to Elisha’s discovery of the Californio Bridled Stock Horse Tradition. She truly felt she had found what resonated. The signal/balance methodology Elisha saw through the Bridle horse progression made sense to the horse. The result being subtle, soft, turn on a dime horses, that have a sense of dignity, accomplishment and purpose. This time honoured art form of the vaqueros has become Elisha’s pursuit. It pairs so well with her love of horse first horsemanship. Elisha also writes a monthly horsemanship article for Saddle Up magazine and is in her first year of teaching clinics, pairing up with fellow horsewoman, Kylie Bartel of K Bar Rider Mindset & Counselling Therapy.

What Elisha teaches is horsemanship. Horsemanship to her is really getting to know and understand the individual horse, and pursuing relationship with them, in a way that makes sense to the horse. To achieve this Elisha feels we need to reach to understand the horse as a species, let go of our own agenda and ego, even if temporarily, in pursuit of forging trust and communication in the ultimate prey/predator relationship. Elisha wants to emphasize how with better feel, patience and understanding, along with honed timing and skill, we can achieve pretty much anything with horses! Elisha does not teach a specific discipline, as she believes good horsemanship improves whatever we are looking to do with horses, from dressage to barrels!