Robert Truswell and Kieran Daunt were fighting again. The miners had been brawling for more than 20 years, ever since they first set up their side-by-side claims near the Yukon's fabled Bonanza Creek. It was what they did when they weren't looking for gold.
But Aug. 28, 2003, was different. Mr. Daunt's heart pounded when he heard Mr. Truswell's truck tires crunch on the gravel road. He believed Mr. Truswell had come to shoot him.
"You've always robbed from me!" Mr. Truswell yelled at Mr. Daunt from the cabin of his pickup. Mr. Daunt stopped his work. "You've taken my peanut butter!" Mr. Truswell continued, his face taut with rage. "You've taken my food! You've taken my tools!"
Over the years, both miners had cultivated their frontier-inspired personas, living Spartan lives in their wooden shacks a few hundred metres from one another on rugged Gold Hill. Mr. Truswell kept on his night table a tattered copy of poet Robert Service's Klondike sagas of the first gold rush a century ago. Mr. Daunt slept with his shotgun.
Their personalities might have been outsized, but their disputes were remarkably petty. From peanut butter to boundaries, they fought about everything. At his favourite Dawson bar, Mr. Daunt would expound on these disputes to anyone who would listen.
Lately he had been particularly surly over Mr. Truswell's new business relationship with Mr. Daunt's father -- a Yorkton, Sask., doctor who came to Dawson to mine the creeks in the summer, when the midnight sun allows miners to moil for their gold all night and all day.
Robert Service called it "the spell of the Yukon": The fever dream of sudden riches lures men who may have nowhere else to go, and often leaves them disappointed wrecks. For these two miners, years of bitterness were about to climax.
The way Kieran Daunt recalled it, he was staring at a man he believed wanted him dead. "He was firm, but his arms weren't moving," he said. "I thought he had a gun in his arms." Mr. Daunt was paralyzed with fear. "This is it," he thought. "My life is over. This is how it ends."
When Robert Truswell threatened violence, he usually followed through. He was nicknamed Two-by-Four Bob after he swung a wooden plank at the head of carpenter Gary Hodge in 1982 in Diamond Tooth Gertie's casino, cracking his head in three places. After the assault, Mr. Hodge spent more time in a coma than Mr. Truswell did in jail.
Mr. Daunt said he reached for the seven-millimetre Mauser rifle in his truck and fired a warning shot.
"Do you remember what happened next?" his lawyer, Richard Fowler, asked at Mr. Daunt's second-degree murder trial in Whitehorse this month.
"The next thing I remember is, there's a vehicle coming at me, trying to run me over."
Mr. Daunt said he fired two more shots at Mr. Truswell, who gunned the engine and took off down the steep, gravel road.
Police found him at the foot of the hill, his head resting on the passenger seat. Shot twice in the torso, he bled to death in less than 10 minutes. He was unarmed. He didn't even have shoes on.
Feuds have raged in the Klondike since before the first nugget was discovered in bedrock beside Rabbit Creek, which was instantly renamed Bonanza Creek.
California-born prospector George Carmack got credit for spotting the shimmering nugget in August, 1896, but others said his partner, Jim Henderson, had found it while Mr. Carmack dozed under a birch tree. Mr. Carmack got the nickname Lyin' George.
In any case, the 'Discovery Claim' unleashed one of the biggest gold stampedes in history, as fortune-seekers raced from across the continent and beyond, north to the Klondike Valley. Over the next three years, the tiny trading post of Dawson ballooned into a city of 30,000. By the turn of the 20th century, however, most of the prospectors had gone home and the big gold companies moved in to dredge the creeks.
Today, Dawson City's main street is lined with false-front, pioneer-style wood-frame buildings that have been carefully restored as gift shops and restaurants. Busloads of tourists snap photos at the legendary saloons, such as Diamond Tooth Gertie's, named after the famed dance-hall queen. German and Japanese can be heard in Klondike Kate's.
But it's not just nostalgia. Ever since the 1980s, when the price spiked up to $800 an ounce, modern-day prospectors have been drawn here again. Last weekend, the annual gold show at the Dawson arena drew hundreds of miners from across the Yukon.
"This is what makes people crazy," Kieran Daunt said, emptying a bag of gold nuggets on the kitchen counter at the house of his friend Duncan Spriggs. "You can lose your mind for this stuff."
It was Saturday morning, the day after testimony wrapped at his three-week trial. Soon the jurors would begin deliberating over his fate. Out on bail, he had returned to spend time at Gold Hill, his favourite spot on earth.
Mr. Daunt looked much younger than his 50 years, lean and diminutive with a toothy grin, as if the harsh outdoor life has been a tonic to him. His hair was neatly trimmed now and he was clad in a blue plaid shirt, a dramatic departure from his unshaven, bushy-haired prospecting days.
Mr. Daunt arrived in the Klondike in 1976. He was one of six children born in Hong Kong to a doctor and his wife. The family moved to England and Ireland before settling in Saskatchewan. After two years of university, Mr. Daunt worked briefly in telecommunications. Then, in 1973, his father, Ivan Daunt, staked a claim near the Bonanza Creek to mine as a hobby. Three years later, his son followed.
Like hundreds of modern-day gold miners, Dr. Daunt returned south during the winter, but his son, entranced with the freedom, stayed on year-round after 1981.
He described the lifestyle in court: "Far from the madding crowd. . . . You can decide at your leisure what you want to pursue for work that day, and you can take off time whenever you feel like it."
Mr. Truswell's background was more shadowy. A native New Zealander with no immediate family in Canada, Mr. Truswell arrived on the goldfields in the late 1970s, according to his long-time neighbour, James Archibald: "He told me he'd wanted to mine for gold ever since he was 12 years old. That's what we all dreamed about."
When Mr. Truswell first got to Canada, he lived in the West Coast port city of Prince Rupert, where he was briefly married. In 1979, he came to Dawson City and declared, "This is the place I want to mine."
By then, after decades of large-scale dredging, Bonanza Creek resembled a moonscape, but miners staked claims on the treed hillsides beside the creeks. Miners pay $10 to stake a claim, which gives them the mineral rights to the land beneath them. Or they can lease land from a claim holder for a percentage of the haul. The main expenses are equipment and fuel. In the past 30 years, according to Mr. Archibald, miners have taken about 38,000 ounces of gold from the hillside.
Mr. Daunt and Mr. Truswell both chose Gold Hill, just east of Carmack's original claim and up the hill from the Eldorado Creek. Within no time, the miners were feuding in the old Klondike style.
After the shooting, Dawson residents lined up to vouch for Kieran Daunt, reminiscent of the frontier years when disputes were handled by public opinion. They wrote letters of support to the police and made the six-hour car drive south to Whitehorse to testify on his behalf. Friends raised the $15,000 surety required to keep Mr. Daunt out of jail during his trial.
Meanwhile, Mr. Truswell was vilified as an ogre. It was rumoured that he had macheted two German tourists in the bush. Henry Reinink, a 52-year-old Ontario-born man who also mined on Gold Hill, wrote a five-page affidavit arguing that Mr. Truswell should have been run out, the old-fashioned way.
"During the Klondike Gold Rush, the RCMP could give someone 'the Blue Ticket' to leave town just for being a lunatic," Mr. Reinink wrote. "The criminal would be given a boat and some bacon and told to float downstream and never come back.
"If the Crown could have locked up Robert as a dangerous offender since the day he knocked Gary Hodge into a coma with a two-by-four, this would have saved the Klondike area from a two-decade reign of terror."
"I'm glad he's dead," said Mr. Hodge, 54, the recipient of the two-by-four assault, who suffered dizzy spells and hearing loss for years. "It's just too bad it's got Kieran in trouble."
Mr. Daunt pleaded not guilty, claiming he shot his neighbour in self-defence.
But not everybody jumped on the Daunt bandwagon. Long-time neighbour James Archibald, 66, had a soft spot for Mr. Truswell, whom he said was mentally ill. "He needed to be on medication. He needed a psychiatrist."
Crown prosecutor David McWhinnie painted Mr. Daunt as a complicated and conniving individual. Far from being terrorized by Mr. Truswell, he said, Mr. Daunt had a foul temper of his own.
When the Crown called Mr. Archibald to the stand, he broke ranks and told the court that Mr. Daunt had once asked him to kill Mr. Truswell. He had sat on the story for months, going to the police only after Mr. Daunt's preliminary hearing ended in 2004. After listening to the pathologist testify, he developed grave doubts about Mr. Daunt's self-defence plea.
To Mr. Archibald, the trajectory of the bullets that ripped into Mr. Truswell's torso looked like shots fired upon a man who was fleeing. "Those weren't no self-defence wounds," he said.
Mr. Archibald lives in a bright yellow house on the top of French Hill. His operation is a few hundred metres from Mr. Truswell's abandoned, garbage-strewn shack. He has managed to eke out a comfortable living, although his ex-wife left years ago.
Mr. Daunt claimed in court that he once found 133 ounces of gold in a day, but Mr. Archibald doubted his two neighbours had found 100 ounces between them their whole lives. "They weren't heavy hitters." After 30 years, he said, the men were as inept as any rookie.
According to the Mining Recorder, an office that tracks Yukon gold claims, Mr. Truswell had 50 claims and Mr. Daunt just six. The claim Mr. Daunt was mining the day of the shooting was being leased from a B.C. mining company. Mr. Truswell regularly jeered him for mining on land that didn't belong to him.
Mr. Truswell talked big, but he was impatient with learning the trade. "He thought he knew it all," Mr. Archibald said. His favourite scheme was to enter a partnership with another miner to share costs and profits. But the latter never seemed to materialize.
"He'd say, 'Let's all get to together and mine like a collective.' " Mr. Archibald told him to forget it. One by one, the partnerships soured, and Mr. Truswell's behaviour grew more erratic.
Once, Mr. Truswell jumped on the blade of Mr. Archibald's Caterpillar and punched him in the shoulder. In 2000, after a trailer Mr. Archibald was moving scraped some trees on Mr. Truswell's claim, he went into a rage and bulldozed Mr. Archibald's trailer with his own Caterpillar, causing nearly $1,000 damage. Eventually, Mr. Archibald learned to treat Mr. Truswell like a bear in the woods: "Be leery."
At Mr. Daunt's trial, his lawyer urged jurors to discount Mr. Archibald's story. But the miner is adamant that Mr. Daunt asked him to kill Mr. Truswell. He said he knew Mr. Archibald had problems with Mr. Truswell. "I said, 'Move on, Kieran.' Kieran didn't understand moving on."
If anything made Mr. Daunt's hatred for Mr. Truswell more murderous than ever in August, 2003, it may have been the two men's relationships with Dr. Ivan Daunt.
At trial, Kieran Daunt played down his differences with the father he had followed to the Klondike. For instance, his supporters usually neglect to mention that he was accused of beating his father in 2002. (The matter was referred to community mediation.)
Others in town said Mr. Daunt took advantage of his father. "I've known the Daunts for a lot of years," mechanic Wayne Fischer said. "Ivan comes up here in the summers and pays for the repairs on all his equipment, then goes home in the fall. When Ivan leaves, Kieran runs it into the ground."
Mr. Fischer remembered the sight of Ivan Daunt after the beating. "He looked like a raccoon. How could someone do that to their own father? They've been fighting for years."
He said Dr. Daunt tried to help his son, but Mr. Daunt's work ethic was lacking. "At the end of the season, he never had anything to show for it."
In the weeks before the shooting, Mr. Daunt was increasingly galled by news that his enemy had been negotiating one of his partnership deals with his father. An e-mail message Mr. Daunt sent to a female friend four days before the shooting is revealing.
"The parents left but reneged on our deal," he wrote. "They left a loader with Two-by-Four instead. . . . I did not realize how complicit [Two-by-Four Bob]and Mad Ivan were and how much hatred they could focus on me."
As it turned out, Mr. Daunt's parents actually hadn't lent their front-end loader to Mr. Truswell. But then came news that Dr. Daunt had bought up the claim on which his son's shack was located.
In his closing arguments, the prosecutor painted a sharply different picture of the feuding miners' final encounter. Mr. McWhinnie suggested Mr. Daunt was fed up with his neighbour. He was worried Mr. Truswell was growing closer to his own father, whom he also suspected of betrayal.
And his visitor was yelling insults that hit too close to home: "You're a gold thief! You always have been. You've stolen everything off your parents!"
Mr. Daunt, the prosecutor claimed, snapped, grabbed his gun and advanced on Mr. Truswell, firing at him from less than a metre. Mr. Truswell tried to speed away, but Mr. Daunt fired two more bullets. One struck Mr. Truswell and another smashed the passenger window. Police found him at the bottom of the hill, slumped on the passenger's seat.
"Don't get me wrong," Mr. McWhinnie told jurors. "[Mr. Truswell]was obnoxious. He said outrageous things." He also assaulted people and spent time in jail for his crimes.
"[But]this wasn't self-defence. . . . Kieran Daunt was mad. He was angry at Robert Truswell for a number of things. And he shot him."
On Thursday, the jury found Mr. Daunt guilty of second-degree murder. The verdict carries a 25-year sentence, with at least 10 years until parole.
Neither Mr. Daunt nor Mr. Truswell ever came close to realizing their dreams of wealth. Mr. Truswell's home was a three-room shack less than a kilometre from Mr. Daunt's. Neither dwelling has plumbing or central heating.
Twenty-one months after his death, Mr. Truswell's cabin is sprinkled with mouse droppings. Squirrels have invaded the rafters. The bed is a soiled mattress atop a wooden frame. Beside it is a bookshelf and nightstand filled with books, letters and photographs, which provide a glimpse into the troubled man's life.
There are Christmas cards from his parents and two siblings, a brother and sister. The tone of the letters suggest that Mr. Truswell's parents cared deeply about their son and worried about his Canadian misadventures.
"A few lines to wish you a merry Xmas and a prosperous Gold year," his father wrote in 1984. He said he had enclosed money for his son to buy a meal.
The next year, his father's note sounded more concerned. "Thanks for your card. You have not heard from us because our letter are always being returned. Are you now in Dawson City all year. Have you located any gold yet?" he asks. "You do not tell us much."
The letter ended with Mr. Truswell enclosing a bank draft "to buy your dinner."
"It's sad," Mr. Archibald said. "His family cared about him. . . . There must have been a bundle of things going on in his head."
Modern mining is as steeped in secrecy, mistrust, and betrayal as in the Klondike era, when prospectors weren't above bribing officials to move a boundary or change a claim holder's name. Miner Cam Sigurdson tells the story of a man who worked on another miner's claim for a salary, only to swallow one nugget per day, which he passed later on and kept for himself.
Mr. Daunt's Gold Hill neighbour Henry Reinink, who has moved back to Dawson, will admit that at one point he was gripped with gold fever -- an irrational and addictive will to mine. "Some people put all their savings into it and lose it all."
But now, he said, "I got a good pot in 1999 and 2001 and I'm finished." In fact, as the father of an eight-year-old boy, Mr. Reinink is thinking of leaving Dawson altogether. "I'd rather he be a doctor or a teacher than a miner."
Mr. Reinink overheard the fights between Mr. Truswell and Mr. Daunt through the years, and got dragged into a few of his own. Death threats from Mr. Truswell were commonplace, he said. One time, the bearded man stomped onto his claim, accused Mr. Reinink of trying to flood his property and threatened to strangle him.
The source of tension was always gold. Where was it? Who knew about it? Mr. Truswell believed everyone was out to steal his gold.
"Bob was looking for a fight all his life," Mr. Reinink said, stroking his grey beard and sipping a draft beer at Dawson's Downtown Hotel. "A person like that doesn't live long."
As for Kieran Daunt, he might have done better to follow in the footsteps of one of his siblings: He told the court that his brother Michael, an accountant, made hundreds of thousands of dollars as a contestant on the game show Jeopardy. A Daunt had finally hit pay dirt.
Jane Armstrong is a reporter in The Globe and Mail's British Columbia bureau.