Rise of the 1630s South America

Chapter 828 West of the Great River ([-])

It's mid-August. Although the climate in the south of the East Coast Republic is still cold, the weather in the Yakui River Basin in the north has gradually begun to warm up.Although the animals are still hibernating, the industrious immigrants on the east coast have already started intense work: they set fire to a large area of ​​nearby reeds and barren meadows, and then began to measure under the measurements of officials sent by the superior Dingxi County Agricultural Bureau. Allocating land one by one, and this kind of work has been fully started since the beginning of autumn. It is already the end of winter. With the arrival of the last batch of Ming immigrants who have completed quarantine this year, this work has also come to an end. middle.

This is Whetstone, an ordinary new village, located near the small town of Valli Verde in later Brazil.Although it is already a township-level settlement on the immigration map of the Government Affairs Council of the Eastern China Republic, but this place has just been developed, and the population and supplies are scarce. In terms of actual scale, it is indeed a larger village.

This village was built last month, and 1644 Ming immigrants helped the old and the young (since I personally carried out immigration activities in 2, the main source of immigrants on the east coast is no longer refugees, but the people who were plundered after breaking the county seat. Out of humanitarian considerations, people on the east bank tried to use families as units when immigrating, supplemented by some Qing army captives and various rebels. The ratio of male to female is roughly between 1:3 and 1:[-], and young adults account for Nearly halfway there) came here, and then used the wood brought by the car to build sentry towers, warehouses, and gun towers. At the same time, they also took sickles to the swamps and small rivers to harvest giant reeds, and built temporary shacks for themselves.

Because there is a huge whetstone at the entrance of this village, almost everyone sharpens their sickles here, so the team drivers from Dingxi County who are responsible for transporting supplies here call this place the whetstone.Later, the Government Affairs Council and the Beiyazihu ​​District Administrative Office also officially confirmed this name, naming a vast area including this village as Modaoshi Township, which is temporarily under the trusteeship of Dingxi County.

Half a month after the arrival of the Ming people, the superior sent another [-] Moldavian female slaves here, and at the same time there were twice as many young men and women aged [-] or [-].These [-] young people come from three established counties: Dongfang County, Zhenhai County, and Pingan County. They are basically new youths born on the east coast, the so-called "generation that grew up under the red flag".Their family backgrounds are also different, some are from peasant families, some are from workers’ families, some are from civil servant families, and of course some are from professional military families.And no matter what family background, one thing they have in common is that they are not the eldest son!

In other words, they are all second sons and daughters who have no right to inherit family property.After completing the compulsory education enforced by the state (five years in elementary school and two years in junior high school), these people were gathered for short-term skills training, and then moved to Modaoshi Township by the state to serve as the guardians of this wild territory. The first pioneers.

However, due to the small number of outside immigrants in the early days of the founding of the East Coast (1630-1633)—there were only more than 1000 European immigrants in total—these four hundred young men and women who came to Modaoshi Township were almost the same. It is a considerable part of the "East Coast people" born in those years.Moreover, these people have all received a complete seven-year mandatory compulsory education, regardless of the quality of education (there are few teachers, many of them travel to the Bingtuanbao to teach, train cadres and various talents) and the real study time (children generally have to help the family) labor, and military and disciplinary training), at least they have received a superficial and systematic education, mastered knowledge that exceeds the average level of ordinary people in this era, and their characteristics are also different from ordinary people.Therefore, using them to open up wasteland should be more efficient than foreign immigrants-and this is exactly an attempt advocated by some members of the Executive Committee.

The new young men and women are organized by the same young Bingtuanbao graduate cadres. The women cut reeds and grass, while the men act as transporters, lumberjacks, construction workers and other heavy physical workers. Prepare - time is running out now.In addition, among them, some people with better performance in training should be separated, and they will be stationed in the gun tower with the muskets issued by their superiors to guard.After all, relying on those Ming immigrants who have only been here for a few months, it is impossible to resist the Guarani barbarians who are elusive in the forest.

If these new immigrants did not undergo one to two years of systematic militia military training, they would not be able to undergo a qualitative transformation both physically and psychologically.In this part of the East Coast, if you can't quickly transform from an honest, timid mud-legged person into a calm and capable, hard-working pioneer, then you may not be very good in life-there is no need for cowards here.

This is by no means alarmist talk!As the people on the east bank continued to go westward along the Yakui River, the conflict with the Guarani people who had lived here for generations suddenly became unprecedentedly intense.Disputes between the two parties over cultivated land, pastures, forests, rivers, and lakes continued. The Guaraní people were extremely dissatisfied with the "humiliating land purchase price" given by the east bank government, not to mention that the land purchase fees they offered were still a lot of money. "Pieces of paper" (bank acceptances), which infuriated the Guaranís even more.

The people on the east coast obviously have no patience to listen to the "anger" of the Guarani people. With a sense of superiority of civilized people, they rob the Guarani people of their well-developed fields and their livestock.During this process, if the Guaraní people resist at all, what awaits them is undoubtedly a catastrophe. In this process, the judge of the East Coast people first came to read a "ridiculous sentence full of mistakes and omissions" (Spanish language), denying the Guaranís their natural claim to the land and then declaring their practice of farming it "illegal".The next thing was a matter of course. Armed patrols, militias, and even the regular army on the east coast came one after another. The Guarani people had to succumb and were forced to move westward into denser forests.Only there can they gain a moment of respite, but it is destined to be only a moment.

Of course not all Guaranís will succumb!Let’s not talk about the intricate relationship between the Guarani tribes living here and the division of territories. Let’s just talk about some Guaran where livestock or property were robbed by people on the east coast, and relatives were plundered or killed by people on the east coast. The hatred between them and the people on the east bank is so great that they voluntarily stay nearby and use simple weapons and equipment to fight with the army, police and militia on the east bank for a long time to kill and injure the people on the east bank. Damage their morale, hoping to delay or even stop the pioneers on the east coast from advancing westward.

This is the case with many settlements in Dingxi County, which used to expand westward along the Yakui River, where the early settlers fought a bloody tug-of-war with the Guarani before finally driving the barbarians away.For this reason, 378 pioneers were buried in this beautiful land full of pine trees-this number has even exceeded the number of local pioneers who died of various diseases.Of course, the losses of the barbarians were even greater. In the attack of the people on the east bank, more than [-] Guaranis were killed head-on; in the process of being forced to migrate due to the robbing of land, livestock and food, the number of people lost was several thousand. There are also quite a few; in addition, there are those who were exiled overseas after returning to the east bank, and died of diseases after increasing contact with the people on the east bank.

After Dingxi County was officially established and everything was on the right track, the three township-level settlements located farther west, Shifangdian, Laojunmiao, and Modaoshi, are now on the front line bearing the firepower of the Guarani people's hatred. .Gein, all three settlements were built after the war (Second East-West War) when the east coast people moved westward, which broke the tacit understanding with the Guarani people for several years and aroused their serious anger. Therefore, the resistance was also extremely fierce.

When the first batch of lumberjacks arrived in Shifangdian Township, the Guarani people tried their best to engage in a series of confrontations with the cavalry troops on the east coast that escorted the immigrants here at that time, and ended with heavy casualties. .However, this also reminded the people on the east bank that the reclamation operation in the area west of the Taquari River has seriously touched the bottom line of the Guarani people. From then on, they will surely face their anger and the casualties of the pioneers Events are also bound to emerge one after another.

And the facts have indeed proved this point. Since the beginning of last year, 126 pioneers have been killed or injured in Shifangdian and Laojunmiao. Most of them were brutally attacked while working in the wild, resulting in casualties.Even Daoist Zhao Yan, one of the Four Great Masters, was shot in the butt by an arrow, and ended up lying on the bed for several days, very unlucky.

Such a serious casualty incident has seriously damaged the morale of the pioneers to some extent, and created panic among them, making the construction progress of the new settlement much behind schedule.In order to reverse this unfavorable situation, with the approval of the Executive Committee, the Ministry of the Army formally ordered to dispatch the 3rd, 5th, and 6th companies of the infantry, the 2nd and 3rd companies of the cavalry, and the 1st company of the artillery. At the same time, local mobilization was carried out in Xiayihe County and Zhongshan County, and a total of 2000 people from the county militia brigade that had not yet been on the battlefield were pulled over to participate in the crusade against the Guarani people.

The target of this crusade was a large Guarani tribe located near the city of Santa Cruz do Sul, Brazil in later generations. This place was marked as "Yiling" on the map of the Ministry of War, which means that the Guarani people occupied it. hills.At this time, this hill can be called the "axis of evil" within a radius of [-] to [-] kilometers. Many Guarani people settled here and farmed, and almost all the supplies of the Guarani rebels in the wild came from here.After all, those guerrillas are not gods yet, they have to eat and rest, and even the worn out bows and arrows have to be replenished from here. Therefore, after taking down this large Guarani stronghold, I believe that the rebels in the wild will surely die. Pause for a long time.

I didn’t fight here before, firstly because there was not enough investigation, and secondly because it was too far away from the actual control area of ​​the people on the east bank. The expedition was wiped out.

(End of this chapter)