Chapter 1575: The Great Steel Khan

In the fifty-first year of Hongxing, as the twelfth month drew near, the commercial and military farming settlement of Golden City in the eastern part of the United States of Xinzhou was at its most bustling and lively time.

Unlike Golden Gate City, another great city on the western coast of the United States of Xinzhou that was also named after gold, Golden City, situated on the banks of the Golden River, had no gold around it... The place simply had a heap of gold in its place names.

Golden City, Golden River, Golden Grasslands, Golden Forest, Golden Hills... oh, and Gold Prefecture as well — this area was first called Huai Prefecture, named because it was the ten-thousand-household farming-and-herding domain of Prince Huai, Zhu Hekun. But later, in order to attract gold prospectors from the west to settle here, Prince Huai Zhu Hekun changed the prefecture's name to Gold Prefecture.

Although Gold Prefecture had no gold, it was indeed a rich and fertile land, with lush soil and water all around, suitable for both farming and herding. And so those gold prospectors who had been lured over by the heap of gold-character place names, after their gold prospecting failed, gradually accepted their fate and opened up many farms and pastures around Golden City, establishing hundreds of fortified settlements.

That's right — fortresses!

One after another, bastion forts built of rammed earth, with wide, deep moats outside, and on the protruding solid bastions were mounted 12-catty short-barreled bombardment guns capable of firing studded expanding shells!

These fortresses, which could be called impregnable as metal and boiling water, first appeared on the ground of Gold Prefecture in the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth years of Hongxing.

The reason they appeared was that Prince Huai Zhu Hekun and the herders who followed him, having roamed along the Mississippi River for quite a number of years, had finally grown weary of a life of constant wandering and began to settle in Gold Prefecture — their weariness with nomadism was a very natural thing, because these herders were not true Mongols; they were mostly farmers from the northern frontier of the Great Ming.

Moreover, the great plains of central North Xinzhou were simply too fertile!

There was no need at all to follow water and grass from place to place! Find a spot with abundant water and lush grass, settle down properly, open up some pastures and farms — how would life be anything but good? Why run back and forth across the great plains?

As for the winter cold waves on the great plains, they were no problem for the hardy and enduring Hua Xia settlers.

It was simply a matter of clearing more land and raising more cattle and sheep — one year's harvest was enough to eat for several years, so there was no fear of cold waves destroying production.

At the same time, build the houses a bit sturdier and store up more firewood and fodder for the winter, and naturally one could sleep without worry.

Oh, it wasn't entirely without worry.

A nomadic tribe of Indians began to become a source of worry for the people of Gold Prefecture!

This nomadic tribe was called the "Little Soviet Tribe," established around the thirtieth year of Hongxing by Steel, the chief of the Great Soviet Tribe, with the support of the Roman Empire. At the very beginning, it had only a mere thousand-odd households, and they weren't very skilled at herding cattle or sheep, being a half-hunting, half-nomadic tribe, and it was not at all in the eyes of Prince Huai Zhu Hekun and Prince De Zhu Hezhen.

But this "Little Soviet Tribe" was extremely idealistic!

Their ideal was to unify all the Indian tribes on the great plains and establish a Great Soviet Khanate!

In order to realize this ideal, from the day of its founding, the Little Soviet Tribe began continuously campaigning against the Indian hunting and nomadic tribes of the great plains, constantly shattering and absorbing these small tribes.

By around the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth years of Hongxing, the Little Soviet Tribe had swollen from its initial thousand-odd households to nearly five thousand households!

Moreover, imitating the Mongols of the Old World, they began to implement a military-civilian unified Chiliarch and Centurion system, transforming five thousand households of nomadic Indians into a great nomadic army capable of fielding five thousand iron cavalry at any time!

When this great nomadic army approached Gold Prefecture, it could pose a threat to Prince Huai's forces.

Therefore, Prince Huai's forces, who had begun settling in Gold Prefecture, implemented from the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth years of Hongxing the method of gathering together to live and building bastion forts. Groups of three to five hundred households would jointly build one bastion fort and live together, while also implementing military-civilian unification, with everyone having a gun.

And at that time, Zhu Hekun's forces, because they continuously absorbed immigrants from the west coast, and also because herders who had grown up and established their own households kept splitting off, had already swelled to fifteen or sixteen thousand households. In addition, there were several thousand gold prospectors within Golden City, bringing the total population to as much as seventy or eighty thousand... which would have been nothing in the Great Ming homeland, but in the New World it was an enormous number!

After another fifteen or sixteen years of development and multiplication, by the fifty-first year of Hongxing, that is, the year 1699 by the Western calendar, the soldiers and civilians under Prince Huai Zhu Hekun had increased to nearly thirty thousand households, with a population approaching two hundred thousand!

These thirty thousand households and two hundred thousand people were now distributed among Golden City and the fifty-odd bastion forts surrounding it, occupying the thousand-li territory at the later confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers — the so-called thousand-li territory was a bastion belt over one thousand li long, centered on Golden City, extending southward along the Golden River and westward along the Silver River. All the bastion forts were built along the rivers, and the distance between each bastion fort was around twenty li. Before the rivers froze, the bastion forts could be connected to one another by water routes.

And after the rivers froze, because the surroundings were often a world of ice and snow, the Indian nomadic and hunting tribes had long since moved south, so there was no need to worry about attacks.

Therefore, in these fifteen or sixteen years, Gold Prefecture had never lost a single bastion fort, let alone Golden City, which was even more solid than an ordinary bastion fort.

But the continuous growth of the Little Soviet Tribe still made the people within Golden City somewhat worried.

These nomadic Indians wouldn't keep getting stronger and stronger, and in the end become like the Great Mongol Nation, would they?

But no matter how worried they were, the New Year still had to be celebrated properly!

A line of carts and horses wound its way through the west gate of Golden City, and this procession drew quite a few people's gazes. The entire company consisted of fierce, agile men, all armed with guns as a matter of course, and many had knife and arrow scars on their faces, their eyes radiating ferocity — one look told you they were "Plains Wolves" who dared to roam unchecked across the grasslands and snowfields...

At present, the great plains contained three prefectures of the United States of Xinzhou: Gold Prefecture, which had no gold; De Prefecture, belonging to Prince De Zhu Hezhen; and Gao Prefecture, the highland prefecture belonging to Zhu Hehao, located at the eastern foot of the Great Stone Mountains.

The three prefectures formed an inverted triangle, distributed across the central, western, and southern parts of the great plains. But the three prefectures were not closely connected — they were a thousand li apart! That is, between each of the three fortress clusters there was at least a thousand li of "empty zone."

Because these Xinzhou Han people settled on the great plains no longer practiced nomadism, how to maintain communication among the three prefectures became a headache-inducing problem.

And so the great plains rangers known as "Plains Wolves" came into being.

These rangers were the elite of the three prefectures' military households, extraordinarily skilled on horseback, and having long tangled with Indian hunting and nomadic tribes in the wild, every one of them had honed a full set of enemy-killing skills.

And these "Plains Wolves" who came braving the wind and snow today were not returning from killing enemies, but rather escorting several large covered wagons. From one of the wagons, a man of about forty, wearing a fur hat, occasionally poked his head out, narrowing his small eyes to survey everything around him.

This man was named Yamamoto Asatsune, a high official of the United States of Xinzhou, and his family was extremely wealthy — his mother was Aju, the founder of the Chrysanthemum House Trading Company. He himself was Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Grand Secretariat of the United States, and he had traveled all this great distance to Golden City in order to, under the arrangements of Prince Huai Zhu Hehao, go to meet and negotiate with Steel, the chief of the Little Soviet Tribe... to try to sign a mutual non-aggression treaty, and at the same time delineate the borders between the two sides.

Right, and also the matter of the United States of Xinzhou and the Great Soviet Khanate mutually recognizing each other and establishing diplomatic relations!

Just as the wheel of history was about to roll into the eighteenth century, Steel Khan, who had struggled for over twenty years for the liberation of the great plains Indians, was also about to welcome the crowning moment of his life — he was preparing to establish his own Indian khanate!

This would be the first state belonging to the American Indians to reappear since the complete destruction of the Inca Empire in 1572!