More than a decade after its establishment, the market was transformed from an Indian trading post into a medium-sized city, with 50% of the city's more than 13,000 registered residents being Delaware or Delaware mixed-race, and nearly half of them are second or third generations.

These new generations have long since lost substantial social ties with their bloodline compatriots who still cling to the primitive traditions of their tribes and live in the Delaware reservations of Binzhou or Songzhou. Even because of the huge difference in quality of life, many second-generation young men are more than 1.6 meters tall.

Many of the fathers of the Delaware children in the Shangbazaar were refugees from Liaodong in the Ming Dynasty who fled to North America, and their national identity cards also had ethnic labels of Chinese descent written on them.

They speak with a beautiful northern accent mixed with foreign or primitive words, with young men preferring sleek and crisp modern dresses, while girls are more interested in flamboyant Chinese dresses.

Their three meals a day are more like those of later families in southern China, with tea, milk, soy milk, steamed buns, steamed buns and stir-fried vegetables, as well as rice, steaks, ham, juices, cakes, and bread from time to time.

They are also among the lowest-income people in China, with the average household earning less than $300 a year, just over half of the income of Porter, the capital of Songzhou.

In the early years, Shangji City relied entirely on the mining of a high-quality anthracite mine belonging to a state-owned energy and mining group, and when there was a shortage of coal in China and anthracite was sold for US$15 per tonne, the government of Shangji, which had a large tax revenue, itself undertook half of the construction costs of the roads in the mining area.

The second is a number of small enterprises invested by Li Xiang's Huayin Group in the commercial market, which are managed and operated by the brother-in-law Mo Qi's family. They include a cement and brick company, a construction company, a municipal services company, a honeycomb coal company, and a large poultry farm.

Today, the anthracite coal mine with small reserves is about to be exhausted, the city's fiscal revenue has been reduced by nearly half, and the local mining economy has come to an end, but it has not undergone economic transformation in time like West Point, thus becoming the first resource-exhausted town in Huamei.

Many residents of Shangbazaar have chosen to relocate to Port, the capital of Songzhou in the north, or even further afield, Xuecheng, the capital of Yunzhou, if not for the high birth rate in the top three in Songzhou. Otherwise, Shang Bazaar would probably have become the first gorgeous local town to lose population after the 40s.

This lack of succession after only a decade may not have anything to do with the ethnic composition of the country, but it also made the cabinet reflect on whether it was a mistake to choose this place to build a town in the first place.

In order to reverse the decline of the local economy, the Songzhou Prefecture Government and the Shangji Municipal Government can only carry out urban economic transformation. Large-scale agricultural development into the interior was launched, and a major deforestation campaign that lasted for several years began.

Under the leadership of Moqi, the richest man in the merchant market, the axe saw steam bulldozer pushed the stream flat, and the suburban forests were uprooted and the wetland swamps were filled in.

Thousands of high-quality lumber are sold cheaply to the Huamei Wood Group's wood processing plant in Porter, and the rest is burned into charcoal. It became a raw material for smelting high-quality steel and sold to the United Iron and Steel Company, a subsidiary of the state-owned energy and mining group, to fill the city's commodity output after the coal mines were depleted.

It took four years for the city to dig up a piece of agricultural land with an area of more than 20,000 acres from the boundless world of primeval forest, which was quickly purchased by the locals and turned into a farm.

But for now, unless the agricultural land is expanded by two to three times and local agricultural projects are introduced, this slow agricultural economic transformation will not allow the commercial market to get out of its embarrassing situation.

……

……

On the last day of April 1646, the last group of reserve veteran non-commissioned officers to be called up for active duty. He reported to the army base in Xinbao City, Binzhou, and announced the official completion of the establishment of the volunteer brigade of the Chinese and American Defense Forces.

Mo Qi, who had officially returned to active duty three months earlier and had been awarded the rank of brigadier general by Congress, did not appear at the training ground with his subordinates at this time, but stayed at the Songzhou Merchant Market to participate in a public appearance that caused a sensation in the city.

The style of the rally was eerie. At the corners leading to the central square, groups of solemn-looking city police officers maintained order. In the middle of the square, Mochi, dressed in classic Delaware Indian hunter attire, and a group of young supporters shouted and screamed around the giant bonfire that rose in the air in the city's central square. Waving his arms in a ferocious manner. The non-Indian citizens who watched were dumbfounded.

Mochi was appointed as the top commander of an army combat brigade with 70% Delaware officers and soldiers, and was naturally frantically sought after by all the Delaware citizens of the Merchant Bazaar. Although most of the rank-and-file soldiers of the brigade are from various Drava reservations. It doesn't have a dime to do with the second-generation naturalized Delaware people in the merchant market, but the same ethnic pride still makes the citizens talk about it.

On the other hand, in the army base in Xinbao City, Binzhou, driven by veteran non-commissioned officers who have returned to active duty, more than 2,000 young men who have been driven from the reserve by the elders in the name of volunteers have been undergoing old-fashioned and boring recruit training for nearly four months.

The volunteer brigade has a full complement of 2,880 officers and soldiers, which is almost the same number as other combat brigades, but the specific establishment is a bit weird.

The light field artillery battalion and the cavalry company directly under the brigade were composed of Chinese and American nationals, while the other three infantry battalions and one light baggage battalion were basically composed of Algonquin-speaking volunteers from various Indian reservations, mainly of the Delaware.

Combat engineer companies in all infantry battalions were eliminated and replaced with standard infantry companies. The fire support platoons in each infantry company were also eliminated, and all four infantry platoons were all combat infantry.

Complex and troublesome 60mm mortars and 32A heavy revolvers, a separate brigade-affiliated heavy weapons company was formed, which was operated by a Chinese and American national. In addition, in order to strengthen the management of the troops, the original military police platoon directly under the brigade was expanded into a military police company in the volunteer brigade.

Even the training syllabus of the brigade is very different from that of other Wehrmacht or Foreign Legion combat brigades.

According to the standard training code of the Chinese and American Army, all recruits undergo two phases of military training: the first stage is basic military discipline, physical fitness, queue and weapons drills, including phalanx tactics similar to those of modern Europe; The content of the second stage is even richer, including the modern mode of field skirmisher attack and defense tactics, infantry and artillery joint attack and defense tactics, field fortification construction, and so on.

Each training phase lasts for three months, so the entire recruit training cycle will last up to half a year. After that, it will also participate in large-scale joint military exercises to simulate actual combat. Huamei recruits can be regarded as truly capable of fighting in battle.

The Army Command directly canceled most of the training content of the second phase and greatly strengthened the content of the first stage, and extended the training period to five months, and only required the officers and men of the brigade to master a set of strengthened tactics of phalanx line and simple infantry artillery combined and field fortification defense tactics.

In the eyes of some in the Army Command, this disparate troop establishment and training program was entirely determined by the poor personal cultural qualities of the Indian reservation volunteers.

Although there is a reservation community school, the Indian youth who yearn for a beautiful life are still less familiar with the Chinese. In addition to everyday language, most of them can only understand simple military commands, and it is difficult to command them to achieve complex offensive and defensive tactics and infantry and artillery coordination.

They can't operate complex weapons. The maintenance of the 30A rifle and the 32A heavy rotary tube machine gun alone took a long time for veterans to teach, not to mention the 60mm mortar, which requires extremely high operational safety. God knows if those Indian volunteers don't even know how to lift the shell duty insurance when they are nervous, and there have been more than a dozen similar silly stories in the Foreign Legion.

Before 1635, these serious problems also existed in the Wehrmacht and the Foreign Legion, so recruits often went to the battlefield as soon as the first stage of training was over, training with the indigenous savages of the combat area, training with battles, accumulating experience in actual combat and gradually completing the second stage of training. With the training of a large number of grassroots officers and non-commissioned officers in place, the second phase of training has been truly implemented in the recruit training period of the Chinese and US Army.

At present, there is still a shortage of junior officers and experienced non-commissioned officers in Huamei. Therefore, the Wehrmacht Volunteer Brigade, which is privately regarded as a second- or third-rate unit, has chosen a low-grade line in terms of establishment and training. It is only required that the advanced infantry weapons of the United States can be superior to their European counterparts in terms of comprehensive combat effectiveness, and they do not expect to be on par with other Chinese and American combat brigades.

On the training ground, recruits who were scolded by the non-commissioned officers after making mistakes abounded. Some veterans from naturalized national families of Delaware speak Algonquin. With an unbelievably fast pace of speech, the red-faced recruits are driven to the playground track, and the heinous lap punishment is used to make them remember the rules of discipline and combat.

Huamei had strict standards for the physique, weight, and height of the recruits when recruiting soldiers, but faced with the needs of the formation of this army. Standards had to be lowered in all respects: even with military boots with a certain visual height-increasing effect, the average height of Indian volunteers had just crossed the passing mark of 1.6 meters, and only a handful of them could weigh more than 60 kilograms naked.

So privately. Other officers and men of the Chinese and American Defense Forces at the Newcastle Army Base in Binzhou jokingly called the Wehrmacht Volunteer Brigade a "dwarf brigade," but of course such words certainly did not reach the ears of the brigade commander, Brigadier General Mochi.

In order to enhance the physique of these selected Indian volunteers, and to be more worthy of the huge military expenses spent on arming them, in addition to compulsory vaccination of several vaccines, the brigade's logistics supply standards during the training period had to be raised by a large margin.

Not only that, but the brigade has also reduced many high-intensity training programs, and the field equipment of the combat infantry has also been configured as lightweight as possible to adapt to their weak physique. For example, reducing the amount of rifle bullets and grenades carried by a quarter, reducing the daily field rations, and so on.

When General Chen Liwen, commander-in-chief of the army, personally approved the brigade's organization and training program, he made a very vivid and private summary of "an ancient army wearing Chinese military uniforms, holding Chinese weapons, but using the tactics of lining up to shoot."

The only thing that can be commended is that most of these volunteers were good hunters in the reserve before joining the army. They are agile and adaptable to woodland and mountain environments, but these advantages are now offset by the heavy rifles and military backpacks.

……

……

As the Huamei Volunteer Brigade struggled for the final two months of training, a chilling illness was spreading in a Massachusetts Indian reservation community in the inland mountains east of Dongfu City, Haizhou.

Trade was officially banned, and the cities of Dongfu and Fuhe sent National Guard units to block all land traffic to the reservation and impose military quarantine in the affected areas.

The cause was measles, and a Chinese merchant who returned from Bermuda's overseas territory in Dongfu City, who did not show symptoms at the time, then went into the local Massachusetts reservation to buy local produce.

There are five Massachusetts villages on the reservation, with a combined population of about 3,000, which of course was more than two months ago.

Died of hematemesis, died of complications of pneumonia, died of respiratory failure, died of liver failure...... According to the information brought back by the medical team of Dongfu City, the death toll of Massachusetts people on the reservation has exceeded 500, and the same number of patients are bedridden, and there is a tendency for the infection to spread.

Twenty years ago, the measles detoxification vaccine research and development project presided over by Huang Nian was considered to have entered clinical application in the early years, but the supply of local newborns has not yet been guaranteed, let alone the Indians in remote corners of the deep mountains and old forests. The small amount of vaccines that can be left over in the occasional month is also mostly shipped to overseas territories.

It can be said that since the first year of the founding of the People's Republic of China, with the expansion of Indian trade, there have always been epidemics of diseases in Indian settlements throughout North America, ranging from colds to cholera and typhoid fever. In 1632, there was a measles epidemic in the village of the Mohican people near Porter City, Songzhou, and in 1634, there was an mumps epidemic in the Wapinger village in the eastern part of Heping City, Haizhou, and almost all the people in the village died.

In the face of this almost unstoppable invasion of the Old Continent, the Chinese and American authorities can only adopt the mode of isolation in the epidemic area to prevent the expansion. It is not known whether there is nothing to be done, or whether the mind is more than enough and not enough, or even gradually numb.

Those who survive will naturally become the lucky ones who continue the ethnic population, while most will fall victim to the "closeness" of the Old World to the New World.

Of course, syphilis, a specialty of the New World, has also launched a relentless counterattack, especially in some relatively remote small towns, where new immigrants have been infected by local Indian women, making Huamei's health care burden not small.

On the other hand, after Quebec was blockaded by the Chinese and American navies, the French colonies, which had difficulty even gaining a foothold, had to stop aiding the Iroquois Indian Union. The latter finally fell apart under years of oppression and strangulation in Huamei, and the few survivors retreated further north.

The last few "red zones" in Yunzhou marked on the gorgeous map have finally disappeared, leaving only a large "green zone" representing safety and a few "yellow zones" with limited danger.

The fate of the five Indian tribes of the Iroquois League was settled: the most stubborn Senecas and Mohawks suffered heavy losses under the heavy blows of Huamei, and then were swallowed up by the feuding Erie and Huron; The Ornada, Onondaga, and Cayuga tribes, who were divided between sweet dates and sticks, gave in, and the remnants of the old and infirm women and children were forced to move to the Iroquois reservation southwest of Yunzhou, near the Alabachian mountains.

The Iroquois Alliance, which once dominated the northern part of North America, held out for two decades in the war of territorial expansion in the United States, and its unyielding and stubborn resistance was ultimately in vain, becoming a waste of history.

Over the course of twenty years, tens of thousands of Iroquois Indians were captured and served as prisoners of war in various mines or overseas territories in the United States, and a few who performed well and were amnestied were placed in the Viceroyalty of South Africa or the Viceroyalty of the Indian Ocean, becoming the most inconspicuous part of the overseas colonial expansion of the United States. (To be continued.) )

PS: The fifth bullet on New Year's Day.