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 auction”.

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.

In 1859 James Carnegie, 32, the 9th Earl of Southesk, travelled to Canada in search of “good sport” after being advised that it would improve his health after the death of his wife. An eccentric figure, he dressed in the buckskin of the frontiersman but was accompanied by a vast retinue who carried an Indian rubber bath for him and included a gamekeeper from his estate in Scotland and an Iroquois cook.

The earl became one of the first Europeans to explore the Rockies, and his legacy is recorded in an Alberta river, a mountain peak and a mountain pass that bear his name.

He had a mixed attitude towards Native Americans. Although he disparaged some, he praised others as being “tall, straight and well-proportioned”.

His journal, Saskatchewan and the Rocky Mountains, published in 1875, became a bestseller, describing in detail some of the items sold at auction this week. In November 1859, while staying at Fort Pitt, Saskatchewan, the explorer described how he acquired a magnificent dress. “Mr Chastellain gave me a beautiful specimen of a Blood Indian woman’s dress, made from prepared skins of the mountain sheep, and richly embroidered with blue and white beads,” he wrote.

“Such dresses are now seldom to be met with.” Other items sold included a Coast Tsimshian wood rattle that fetched £160,000, a pair of Upper Missouri River beaded hide leggings that sold for £50,000, and a Great Lakes Cree wooden doll cradle that fetched £44,000.

Of the 39 lots, 29 were purchased by the Royal Alberta Museum of Canada, to some extent assuaging the concerns of Native Americans, who feared that the collection would be dispersed among private buyers.

Vernon Bellecourt, a spokesman for the Minnesota-based American Indian Movement, compared the sale to an auction on behalf of “somebody who had a collection of artefacts — clothing, eyeglasses, gold teeth, and diamond rings — from victims of the Holocaust”. The present earl, who farms the 6,000 acres of Kinnaird Castle, was not available for comment yesterday.

However, Sotheby’s defended the sale, emphasising that the items were personal rather than ceremonial and had been legitimately acquired by trade, not force. The auction house was pleased that most of the items would be displayed in a museum.

RIGHTFUL OWNERS

Leeds Museum has agreed to send jewellery back to the Cook Islands, and the Natural History Museum has been in negotiations with the Chitimacha tribe in Louisiana over the return of remains and cultural artefacts

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