Nov 10, 2007 - 19:55:10 CST
KILLDEER MOUNTAINS - All his life, the land he lived on gave up its secrets to him.He gathered the secrets into a story of many chapters, mainly one of blood and death between soldiers and Sioux Indians willing to die to define who would remain and who would leave.
Alick Dvirnak, 88, has always known the family ranch on the south-facing slope of the Killdeer Mountains had a story to tell.
Each piece of the story he found, each stone arrow point, each brass button from a military harness, he saved to study and to ponder.
Over time, he gathered thousands of those pieces, secrets uncovered by the plow and laid bare by wind and water.
He put the best pieces in display cases so he could preserve them and tell their story to the many people who stopped by the family ranch to see where the 1864 Battle of the Killdeer Mountains had been fought.
Today, but for not much longer, those artifacts of history and heartbreak are in a basement in Bismarck, at the home of Alick's son, Bryan.
Bryan Dvirnak has heard the story so often, he can tell it, too, his hand roving from this piece, an unexploded cannonball from the battle, to that piece, a prize arrowhead carried into battle by Bear's Heart, a Sioux too crippled to walk, but willing to fight on his back just the same.
The Dvirnak family, Alick and his wife, Grayce, now living in Colorado, and their six children, have decided the collection needs to come out of the dim basement and into the light of public domain.
They are donating it to Dickinson State University in a10-year agreement.
The university will display it so it can be seen and understood by scholars, students and everyday people. At the end of the decade, the two parties will decide if the temporary arrangement should become permanent.
Alick Dvirnak's collection, found piece by piece, studied, treasured and examined by him for decades, has never been appraised. It will be before it's transferred to the university.
Bryan Dvirnak said when the man's children look at their father's unparalleled collection of both Sioux and military artifacts, they don't see money anyway.
"I see my dad," he said. "He's one of my heroes."
The battle
Alick Dvirnak in his day was not just any rancher, nor is the ranch just any old ranch.
Besides its sheer physical beauty - 4,000 acres of the mountains with diverse timber of towering oak and monochrome poplars, strewn boulders and spring-fed creeks that beavers have dammed into ponds - it is where a historic battle was fought and won by Gen. Alfred Sully or lost by the Sioux, depending on one's perspective, more than 143 years ago.
The battle did not decide history for the Sioux gathered on the present-day Dvirnak ranch a swelteringly hot July 28, 1864.
History already had been foretold; the white man, driven to expand, "civilize" the West and in this campaign, pay back the Sioux for the white deaths in Minnesota in 1862, would not stand down.
Four soldiers died. Two of them are buried on the Dvirnak's ranch on a small plot donated to the North Dakota Historical Society. When Alick Dvirnak was a school boy, kids at the country school each brought a quarter to pay for their grave markers.
No one knows the exact Sioux casualty count, but it was at least 100 dead, perhaps as many as 300.
Battle accounts estimate as many as 6,000 Sioux were encamped there with the mountains providing cover, game and water, certain their numbers presaged victory.
Sully's advance from a base camp near Richardton was a mile square formation - four sides of sweating, armed foot soldiers, mounted shooters and cannons at the corners and mid posts.
It was lethal.
The Sioux fled north, through the mountains and out into the Badlands and the Little Missouri River country.
What they couldn't carry, they stashed in the timber - food, tools, clothing.
Sully ordered his troops to destroy everything in the deserted Sioux camps and set fire to the mountains.
Back at the ranch
There has been a Dvirnak at the ranch since 1928.
It was purchased by Jack Dvirnak, Alick Dvirnak's father, only the third owner after W.L. Crosby, who came from a Wisconsin lumber family, and Wilse Richards, a Texas cattle driver, who bought it from Crosby's widow in 1897.
Crosby was a law school classmate of Theodore Roosevelt and they crossed historical paths in 1886. Roosevelt, living then at the Elkhorn Ranch in Billings County, stopped at the ranch to borrow a wagon to transport to jail in Dickinson a pair of scoundrels who'd stolen his boat off the Little Missouri River.
History, like beauty in those mountains, is everywhere.
Craig Dvirnak lives at the ranch, still raising the family's distinctive cross-breed cattle marked with the second-oldest registered brand in North Dakota, the Diamond C.
He has eyes like his father's for the secrets the ranch still yields.
He has found hundreds of his own; literally almost stumbling over them, like the time he was chasing a bull out of the high pasture and all but stepped on a fairly intact copper kettle. It was one of hundreds that had been collected from the deserted camp, tossed into a ravine for garbage and later salvaged for scrap metal.
In the early days, workers at the ranch gathered up enough heavy rock Sioux hammers to fill a couple of wagons.
Craig Dvirnak's kids were in the barnyard recently and found a nice spear point, metal trade knife and a thumb scraper.
Craig Dvirnak knows the family's patch of the mountains like the back of his own hand. He knows the likely ways the Sioux fled north through the trees that were burned behind them and has found traces left from where the soldiers piled Sioux goods for burning.
He knows where all the springs are, where the tepee rings push out through the thick grass. He knows where the battle was pitched and he knows where Bear's Heart lay and where his dad, after looking for years, finally found Bear's Heart's arrow.
Like his dad, he likes talking with the people who come to the ranch, looking for the battlefield and the graves of the two dead soldiers. The kitchen table from which 200-year-old burr oaks can be seen out the window is a customary place to start the fascinating conversation.
People are always welcome to hike, so long as they check in with the family and use common sense with fence gates and matches.
Craig Dvirnak said his father long expressed hope that his own collection wouldn't be split up and that it would be shared with the public.
Donating it to Dickinson State University accomplishes both those goals.
Someday, Craig Dvirnak expects his own collection will join his father's.
He isn't ready yet, because he isn't done looking. He knows that as many secrets as the ranch and the Killdeer Mountains have already yielded, there are still an untold number waiting to be discovered.
"I told my dad, 'Wherever yours ends up, mine will too. Someday, somewhere, they'll be together,' " Craig Dvirnak said.
(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511, or lauren@;westriv.com.)
Carole Gilpin wrote on Jan 1, 2008 6:45 PM:
Bryan Dvirnak wrote on Nov 25, 2007 9:40 AM:
Pick Your Battles! wrote on Nov 21, 2007 12:18 PM:
Private ownership of history? wrote on Nov 20, 2007 9:58 AM:
Preservation!!!!! wrote on Nov 19, 2007 9:59 AM:
Preservation or Looting? wrote on Nov 12, 2007 9:26 AM:
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