Scottish Earl’s Native American artefacts sold at Newyork Auction
Published May 11th, 2006
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A SCOTTISH laird has raised £2.4 million by selling a collection of rare Native American artefacts in an auction that was compared to selling gold teeth from victims of the Holocaust.
For nearly 150 years the contents of a trunk brought back by the 9th Earl of Southesk from his trek across the Rocky Mountains — where he described some of the people he met as “bloated, disgusting savages†— lay gathering dust in the attic of Kinnaird Castle, his ancestral home in Angus.
But yesterday the family of David Carnegie, 45, the present Earl of Southesk, was celebrating after the 39 items, including beaded clothing, knives, pipes and moccasins, had sold for record prices in New York. Sotheby’s, the auction house, said that the sale was “the most historically significant group of American Indian art ever to be offered at auctionâ€.
The centrepiece was a Blackfoot tribe pony-beaded hide man’s shirt, which sold for £430,000, twice the expected amount and a record for a Native American art object at auction. It also included a Northern Plains beaded hide woman’s dress, which sold for £270,000, nearly three times the estimate. The dress was originally acquired from a native man who stripped his wife on the spot after being offered a bottle of rum in exchange.
