New Shun 1730

Someone once commented on the gold rush in the American West in history.

Because it is far, it is romantic.

Because it is close, it can be reached.

Romance means anarchic chaos, absurdity, and magic.

Reaching means that there are a large population nearby, as well as a large number of miners eager to get rich from the previous gold rush. You can get there with a little preparation.

The absurdity and magic of the gold rush in the West in history created romance.

For example, because of gold mining in the bitter cold land, and because of the large number of miners who went there first and then agricultural production, eggs in the mining area were worth one gold coin each. In order to show off their wealth to the beauty, the gold miner bought all the eggs in the mining area and smashed them all, because the beauty he liked was having dinner with someone else before, and the person who invited her to dinner treated the lady to boiled eggs.

The gold rush in the West in history was far enough away from the settlements at that time, creating a spontaneous frenzy.

For example, when more than 4,000 Chinese miners in San Francisco heard that there was gold in the north, they packed their bags and set off on a gold-digging journey to Vancouver. The difficulty of the entire journey was not even as great as smuggling Sichuan salt to Hunan and Chu.

Now, the gold rush planned by Dashun will be neither so far nor so close; neither romantic enough nor so close.

It should be said that the immigration and reclamation activities driven by the gold rush initiated by Dashun are "unworthy" of the word "romantic" and "magical" gold rush.

But as Lao Ma once commented, the impact of the gold rush on the world at that time was greater than the February Revolution in France.

This evaluation is also worthy of the gold rush initiated by Dashun.

The technology of steam engines has already sprouted, and Dashun is now in urgent need of a large amount of precious metal currencies such as gold and silver to invest in industry, mining, infrastructure, Indian planting, and cotton yarn.

It is still too slow to rely solely on absorbing gold and silver from Europe. Because Liu Yu took too big a step, with the end of the war against Europe and the completion of the expansion period, such a big step, if the capital chain is broken in the middle, it will definitely be a disaster.

And the first step to prevent the disaster is to complete the gold mine exploration in the "North American wheat and livestock mixed agricultural belt" in the future.

At this time, on the west coast of North America, a group of prospectors sent by Dashun, led by several Haida guides, were going up along the river in the Vancouver area in the future.

The Haida people and Dashun have been trading for many years. The high profit of sea dragon skin, the development of Dashun's handicraft industry, and the cross-ocean relay of cowpox have made the relationship between Haida people and Dashun fur traders quite good.

The Russian Cossacks are very short of commodity exchange. They have nothing to exchange, so they can only kill, kill, kill, and rob. On the Dashun side, a foot of cloth and a red headband can be exchanged for a group of women to go to the mountains to collect berries to resist scurvy, not to mention the profitable business of exchanging wine for sea dragon skin.

As the trade deepened, the Haida people finally found a good thing - it turned out that gold, which they did not value and only used as decorations, could be exchanged for so many things? A Haida took a piece of dog-head gold weighing more than six kilograms and exchanged it for about four barrels of sorghum wine, half a car of blankets, a barrel of dates, a large bag of sugar, and some preserved fruits from the Dashun merchants.

The people on the Dashun side also followed the gold in the hands of the Haida people and began to head upstream to look for gold mines.

The prospecting team consisted of about sixty people, some of whom had participated in the previous gold rush in the Yukon River.

There, the wisdom of the working people was fully demonstrated.

The gold diggers of Dashun relied on the permafrost of the Yukon River and took the method of setting fire to the permafrost to obtain gold sand.

Because of the existence of permafrost, they did not need to build the supporting structure required for the mine at all.

Relying on this stupid method, gold digging in sparsely populated places like the Yukon River is still very profitable, because it does not require a large number of people to cut wood, build mine support frames, etc.

The environment there is certainly bad, at least much worse than here.

Since there is bitterness before sweetness, those who survived in the Yukon River naturally regard the environment here as paradise.

Vancouver, just look at the name, you will know that the person who discovered this place in history was mostly of Dutch descent. Wenzhe is probably another transliteration of the Dutch word Van, VAN.

But in the language of the Haida people, this place should be called Maple Forest.

Just like the Dutch called Batavia, which was renamed Coconut Grove City.

This city, which should have been called Vancouver in history, has now been renamed Maple Bay.

Maple trees mean temperate zone.

Temperate zone means not as scary as tropical zone, poisonous snakes, insects, malaria, fever, etc., are simply not worth mentioning compared to tropical zone.

Maple trees also mean that wheat, soybeans, corn... even peanuts and rice can be grown here.

Of course, it also means that there are distinct four seasons here.

For a group of people who originated from the Central Plains, a place with distinct four seasons is undoubtedly attractive.

In addition to prospectors, there are also some people responsible for map drawing and longitude and latitude measurement in this team of more than 60 people.

They set out from Fenglin Bay, where a lot of people have gathered and the town has just been formed, and prepared to go upstream along the river.

It is not easy to set out in autumn, because Fenglin Bay starts to rain in autumn, and it rains continuously.

It is not cold in winter, but it will rain all the time.

It is also a good opportunity to take advantage of the winter rainy season to put on some weight here in autumn, and wait for the rain to stop in the spring next year, so that they can set out.

Maplewood Bay, a small town, now has a population of more than 600. Less than half of them are Haida women who have married or Haida men who have joined companies. It is not that many, but because it is the estuary of several rivers, it is also The fur company is the trading base here, so a typical Chinese-style trading town has appeared here.

The main reason is that gold mines have been discovered on Haida Gwaii Island in the north. The previous gold mining on Haida Gwaii Island has caused Dashun to begin to try the "state-owned land sales in blocks" model. , allowing some gold diggers to settle here and start farming.

Of course, the landlord-tenant model is not feasible, because even if a landlord has money to buy tens of thousands of acres of land, if he does not dig for gold, he can earn back the money for the ship ticket in 100 years by farming the land and collecting rents.

It is said that if you have the foresight before and after, you should know that this place will definitely be popular in the future, so come early and become the owner. However, no one is willing to make such an investment that lasts for more than thirty to fifty years, and Dashun does not allow it at all - there can and can only be one landlord, and it is a very large landlord, and that is the imperial court.

Nowadays, when cultivating people here, they also have to pay land tax, but they are all taxes in kind to provide for the school.

Some young people from the Yan-Li School also came here to practice the Yan-Li School in accordance with the "Utopia" they envisioned.

Township covenants, schools, militia, tithe tax, ban on land sales, etc.

Not bad. The main thing is that what this place lacks is ideal and educated people.

Of course, there is exile in Dashun. Many officials make mistakes and are basically sentenced to exile, but they generally do not go to such places.

The main reason is that Dashun knows what its core is and also knows that its basic base is China.

Therefore, as a cultural class, the exiles of these scholar-officials were either thrown to the Western Regions or Heilongjiang, which can be regarded as "waste utilization", thereby increasing the cultural inheritance there and increasing the centripetal force of the border areas.

Just like a joke from hell under the Manchu rule, the place with the highest per capita diploma in the north is actually Ninggu Pagoda...

In a place like this across the ocean, it is impossible for Dashun to throw "precious" criminal scholar-bureaucrats here.

The good thing is that the Yan and Li school, which emphasizes the six arts and neglects the classics, is mixed here with practical learning and new learning, and there is less empty talk. The school also follows the principle of "learn the six arts from the outside in, learn one art if you can't learn the six arts, and learn one art if you can't learn the six arts." It cannot be the idea of ​​"learning one art and half art, learning medicine, learning mourning, learning weddings, farming, and blacksmithing".

In recent years, the weather has been good and the people are healthy, and it looks like the rule of three generations.

Of course, the main reason is the abundance of land, because an important factor that suppresses the development of productivity in Dashun is that there is too little land, which prevents each labor force from realizing its labor potential. Obviously in terms of technology, experience, and hard work, a labor force can cultivate 30 to 50 acres of land without any pressure, but due to the limitations of the means of production, it can only work on those 23 acres of land.

The life of the prospecting team here is quite good. There is no shortage of food or meat here, but there is a shortage of some handicrafts.

The meaning of currency here is not very big, or it is seriously distorted, so the prospecting team can exchange some cotton cloth here for enough food to use for autumn fat.

The autumn rain never stops, but compared to the war on the other side of America, the time here is so quiet that many people lie on the windows and curse at the dripping raindrops, which is unbearable.

"If this continues, hair will grow all over my body."

With such complaints, we stayed up until the third day of the third lunar month of the next year, when the sky finally cleared up.

Like almost all Han villages, when the prospecting team finally set off, the people in front of and behind the houses were busy planting vegetables.

On March 3rd, plant peppers, eggplants, okra, shepherd's purse, mustard seeds, lettuce, carrots...

The farm songs are singing and the charm is endless.

Those in the prospecting team who had been living on the Yukon River for many years were filled with emotion when they looked at this scene of people busy planting vegetables in spring.

"At least, when I'm digging for gold here in the future, I'll be able to eat and serve food. Do you know how much gold a big white radish costs in exchange for gold when I'm digging for gold in the north?"

"There is no shortage of meat there, but there is really little food. That's where I lost my tooth..."

A man in the prospecting team opened his mouth as he spoke, revealing teeth that had been lost due to scurvy.

"Why don't you get a gold tooth?"

The young man in charge of surveying and mapping in the prospecting team asked curiously. The dentistry in Dashun was quite advanced. The Ryukyu Kingdom came here to study medicine a long time ago, and many of them studied dentistry. Nowadays, not many people living in Dashun have good teeth, and here, big gold teeth are even more common.

The one with bad teeth said: "I can't bear to part with you. I'm not a bachelor. If I can help bring my brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles here, wouldn't it be better than the life in my hometown? Why did I go to Guandong in the early years? ? Isn’t it really hard to survive? Everyone knows that digging for gold in Guandong will lead to death, but how can you survive with that little land? "

"I will almost die when mining. I am not prepared to let my relatives come here to dig for gold. It is better to get some land and farm here. Isn't it better to grow some vegetables near the mining area and exchange for gold than to be a mine rat?"

"A gold digger needs to be supported by three or five people. There has to be a farmer, right? There has to be a vegetable grower, right? There has to be a tailor, right? There has to be a wine seller, right? There has to be a kiln shop, right? I say, unless you really can’t survive, don’t go digging for gold. It’s better to go to school and learn a craft like a blacksmith or a tailor, that’s how you’ll be able to earn a living.”

"Gold diggers... Hey, one gets rich, nine die poor. There are so many tricks. Betrayal by friends, murder in cahoots, suffocation by blocking holes, hiding gold in the buttocks, being caught hiding and tied to a tree to be sucked dry by horseflies... This place is so remote, you can't get anything from heaven or earth, how can you young kids understand?"

The prospector with a mouth full of bad teeth perfectly interprets the word "romance" in the phrase "romance of gold panning".