KILLDEER - Anya Dvirnak held a piece of what has long been her granddad's life in her hand Thursday.

In her palm rested a small, but perfect, white arrowhead she'd found that morning in freshly turned soil on the Dvirnak ranch in the Killdeer Mountains.

Her granddad, Alick Dvirnak, was recognized for transferring his lifelong collection of Plains Indian artifacts and cavalry remnants associated with the Battle of the Killdeer Mountains to the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University.

Living on the ranch where the battle was fought, he spent a lifetime looking for the pieces, each arrowhead, each stone hammer, each rifle casing and cannonball shard as thrilling as the find his granddaughter made that very morning.

"I'm happy to have it here for the public to look at," he said to the 150 or so who attended the artifact collection unveiling, standing sharp in his black suit and boutonniere.

Two soldiers died in the battle. As many as 200 Sioux Indians died, before thousands encamped there fled the mountains, leaving their possessions to the fires ordered by Brig. Gen. Alfred Sully.

David Gipp and his mother, Margaret Gipp, members of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, attended the unveiling.

The 1864 battle at what is now the Dvirnak ranch was their personal, painful history.

To David Gipp, the artifacts in the tasteful wood and glass case catalog a story of war and violence. "It was ours (land) that was taken, and it was taken with violence," he said.

The Dvirnak ranch is part of the story of change and bloodshed and Alick Dvirnak said his most treasured piece is a spear point that belonged to a crippled Sioux warrior. "I looked for it for many years," he said.

The Dvirnak ranch, like all land, is a crossroads of humanity over time.

Theodore Roosevelt spent a night there in 1886, while escorting a pair of scoundrel boat thieves from the Badlands to jail in Dickinson. That slim connection to Roosevelt is one reason why the collection fits in the newly opened Theodore Roosevelt Center at DSU. Clay Jenkinson, its director, said the center will show the world Roosevelt lived in while in North Dakota.

The center will also become a virtual Roosevelt Presidential Library, when more than 600,000 documents of Roosevelt's are digitized and sorted in a decade-long project that will make DSU the cyber center of the man's life and work.

The Dvirnak collection may cause others to donate items related to Roosevelt, or to the time he spent in North Dakota.

Five of Alick and Grayce Dvirnak's children and many grandchildren attended the unveiling.

It was a gratifying moment and a generous one, since the collection, sold, would have considerable collector's value.

"This is my dad's life," said his daughter, Diane Carson.

Alick Dvirnak doesn't live at the ranch any more, but he has passed on a love of the ranch's history to more than one generation.

The arrowhead his granddaughter found, made by skilled hands so long ago, was clearly not the first and surely not the last piece the Killdeer Mountains hide.

"There's still oodles out there," Alick Dvirnak said.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@westriv.com.)