When visitors come to town these day, they usually pick up a few souvenirs; maybe a Jasper the bear plush toy, t-shirt, or a totem pole replica. What if you were Jasper’s first tourist? 

James Carnegie, the ninth Earl of Southesk took hides, crafts, moccasins, mittens, gun cases, knives, hymn books, sashes, jewelry, dresses and a whole host of other items back to his castle in Scotland. 

Traveling through the area in 1859, the Earl “was the first tourist in the area,” said Val Delill, exhibit coordinator for the Jasper-Yellowhead Museum and Archives. “Others had come before him, but they’d all come for some reason,” said Delill, “either working for the railway or working the fur trade, so he was the first person who came for his own pleasure.” 

Having spent nearly 150 years in Kinnaird Castle (at least some the time in an old trunk), the descendants of Carnegie put much of the collection up for auction at Sotherby’s in April 2006. Given the historical importance of the artifacts to the area, the Royal Alberta Museum (RAM) launched an initiative to acquire at least some of the items that were up for sale.   

“We’ve known about that collection for a while,” said Ruth McConnell, assistant curator of ethnology at the RAM, adding that she found it hard to believe the family would sell it. With $486,000 from the Alberta government and another $600,000 from the federal government, the RAM was able to acquire 33 of the 43 items that were up for auction. 

“The auction was a “terrifying” experience,” joked McConnell, but they did get many of the items they had hoped. Parts of the family’s collection were not sold however and are part of the décor of Kinnaird Castle, such as the grizzly bear the earl killed in Saskatchewan, she said. 

The Jasper-Yellowhead Museum and Archives have an exhibition featuring some of the earl’s artifacts that runs until the long weekend in September. “The museum there was interested in it [the collection] and those were the pieces he would have worn in the Rockies,” said McConnell. 

The exhibit in Jasper features a gun case that was made for the earl by the wife of one of the hunters he traveled with, a number of different ornate pouches and knife sheaths, as well as photos of the earl reading a book and a number of excerpts from his diaries about his travels. 

Asked whether getting these items was a big coup for the museum, Delill said, “that’s how I feel about it. Being able to borrow items from the Royal Alberta Museum has definitely felt like we’ve come up a step in the world of museums. Being trusted with the artifacts that we’ve borrowed from them is really something that we’ve really enjoyed having,” she said.