The weather in Jiangnan at the end of the Ming Dynasty was also quite abnormal, and heavy snowfall was not common in later generations, but it was not uncommon in this period. Pen ~ fun ~ pavilion www.biquge.info

Since the beginning of December, three heavy snowfalls have fallen in the mountainous areas west of Huzhou.

While the heavy snow brought problems to Zhao Jianji, Ling Mengchu and others, it also posed a great threat to the chaotic people of Tu Achou's subordinates who fled into the mountains.

Tu Achou and the others, who had just fled into Niutou Mountain, were not too worried about food at present, and what they lacked now was winter clothes and quilts.

There are a total of four ancient villages in Niutou, and the population of these four villages is only a dozen households, and the number of households is not more than 100.

The reason why the population is small is because the population is too large to feed.

Although there are dense forests all over the mountains, especially moso bamboo, at this time, in the deep mountains and old forests of western Zhejiang, the planting of corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes and other crops has not been promoted, so the output of grain directly determines that it is impossible for too many people to survive in the mountainous area of Niutoushan.

However, even these populations have long been plagued by the unfashionable bandits who occupied Niutou Mountain before.

This group of thieves who used to occupy the mountain on Niutou Mountain and were at ease, the boss was called Zhou Guoneng, a monk who was still a layman, and he originally robbed the road and farmed the land on the trail in this Niutou Mountain for a living.

Since the tsunami disaster in the seventh year of the Apocalypse, there have been people fleeing to this mountain one after another, and after a long time, it actually made this vulgar wine and meat monk Zhou Guoneng save a team of people and horses, and became the king of the mountain on Niutou Mountain.

After Tu Achou, Cheng Zai, Chen Dalang and others entered Niutou Mountain under the guidance of Zhou Guoneng, the people in the villages in Niutou Mountain were either killed or thieves, and the grain and livestock were taken away as food, and the women and women were occupied by the Taihu Lake thieves and became the ladies of the village, and some of the houses that were forcibly requisitioned also gave the leaders of these thieves a place to stay temporarily.

Tu Achou was originally an honest peasant man, but by chance, he came to Taihu Lake to become the boss of the water thief, in terms of his nature, it can be regarded as a conscience, seeing his subordinates, especially those water thieves who have accumulated years, killing people and setting fires, ** captivity, and he doesn't like it in his heart, but although he is the boss of this group, he can't take care of everything.

He can become the boss of the Taihu Lake thieves, but also because he has the capacity to tolerate people, he will take in all kinds of villains, and those heinous and desperate habitual thieves also come to him.

But the result of this is serious, that is, this rebel bandit has no discipline at all.

In the general direction, these people are still obedient to Tu Aqiu's command, but in various subsections, they have always gone their own way.

It's like saying, you're the boss, and you decide where to rob and how to rob, but you can't control what you grab and what happens during the looting.

And Tu Augly is just a rude man who doesn't know a single word, three or five hundred people can't understand it, and now more than 20,000 people are following into the mountain at once, and the management in all aspects is even more messy, even worse than no one to manage.

The 20,000 or 30,000 people were soon divided into dozens of gangs, large and small, and the leaders with more food followed the rebels, and the leaders with less food followed the rebels, and those who had only charged into battle before and had no time to loot could now only follow behind the buttocks of others and beg for food.

In this way, this group of chaotic people survived the Chinese New Year's Eve of the first year of Chongzhen on the snowy mountain, and hundreds of old and weak women and children froze to death every day.

Some of these people were found by the backbone leaders of the thieves and then executed, some got lost and died of starvation in the wind and snow, and of course, some lucky people fell into the hands of Ling Mengchu and Deng Tongchang, the inspector of the Changxing County Inspection Department.

Because the inspection department of Changxing County is the farthest away from Jiaxing Mansion and far away from the road west to Niutou Mountain, Tu Achou, a gang of thieves, has suffered the fate of being scattered and even coerced away by other county inspection divisions along the way.

At the same time, with the victory of the defense of Huzhou Fucheng and the victory of the township soldiers led by Ling Mengchu, the inspectors of the inspection departments and the big landlords in the counties of Huzhou Prefecture also became bolder.

Later, I learned that Tu Achou's gang of chaotic people had entered Niutou Mountain to spend the winter, and everyone knew that they would not be able to jump for long, so there were more people who recruited troops to help suppress them, and more people who donated food and wages.

When Cai Maode led 13,000 troops all the way through the wind and snow, and finally arrived in Changxing County, Huzhou Prefecture, on the afternoon of the eighth day of the first lunar month, it was such a situation inside and outside Niutou Mountain, which was more than 40 miles away from Changxing County.

Changxing County Order's surname is Wen, the name is real, the word is false, Wanli 42 years of Nanzhili Chizhou Mansion was born, Tianqi three years to elect the county order has been five years, only know the honest duty, do not understand the way of speculation, so has not been promoted.

At this time, such a thing happened, and his county had not been looted, as long as he did a good job in the transfer of grain and grass for the army, and quelled the Tu Agu Rebellion, he must have his own share of credit.

Therefore, when Cai Maode led the army to Changxing, the Wenxian Commander also arranged for the army to enter the camp that had been prepared before the saddle, and then together with Ling Mengchu and Deng Tongchang, he led the county government soldiers and prepared all kinds of hot food for the army.

Ling Mengchu and Deng Tongchang were both locals, plus a Wen county order from the Chizhou Prefecture in Nanzhili on the other side of Niutou Mountain, Cai Maode, Zhang Cunren, and Zheng Zhihu quickly further figured out the terrain around Niutou Mountain.

There are a total of five roads in and out of Niutou Mountain, which are distributed in the mountains and forests within a radius of nearly 100 miles.

It is said to be a radius of 100 miles, but in fact, it is only more than 30 miles in a straight line from east to west, and more than 30 miles from north to south.

At this time, the west of Niutou Mountain does not need to be considered, because this Niutou Mountain is hundreds of miles in circumference, but there is only a narrow mountain road to the west, and it has to spiral upwards and climb over the ridge of more than 1,000 zhang high.

Therefore, what Cai Maode, Zhang Cunren and others need to consider is just four intersections of more than 30 miles long from north to south in the east of Niutou Mountain.

After Cai Maode arrived in Changxing County, under the guidance of Ling Mengchu, Wen Shi, Deng Tongchang and other local officials and people, he inspected the routes in and out of Niutou Mountain one by one, and then assigned tasks to his subordinates, with Zheng Zhihu's 5,000 elites as the main force, stationed in Changxing and Si'an respectively to prevent Tu Achou and other thieves and dogs from jumping over the wall in a hurry.

The others were all auxiliaries, led by Zhang Cunren and others, who were responsible for recruiting and assisting the people in Huzhou Prefecture to dig deep trenches along the east side of Niutou Mountain.

Heavy snow and freezing weather, digging a deep trench more than 30 miles long to connect the four roads in and out of the east side of Niutou Mountain, of course, is very difficult.

But there is no way around it.

Although the heavy snow closed the mountain, it was difficult for the thieves on the mountain to fly, but at the same time, it also made it impossible for the official army led by Cai Maode to enter the mountain at all and launch an attack on the thieves hiding in the mountain.

Nothing could be done except digging a long trench.

Fortunately, Cai Maode had already considered the difficulty of digging a long trench in this season, and asked people to go up the mountain to cut down the next batch of bamboo, pour tung oil and set it on fire until the ice and snow melted and the land thawed.

In some places, there were bamboo forests or shrubs, so they simply set fire to the matter, and while sending people to set fires, they mobilized a large number of young people to excavate, which made the excavation in the first month of the long trench such a difficult project to be carried out smoothly and with great difficulty.

After the Spring Festival in later generations, the spring in the south of the Yangtze River is even here, the mountains are full of flowers, the grass grows and the warblers fly, and the scenery is beautiful.

But Jiangnan in this time and space, even in February, is still cold.

During the late Ming and Chongzhen periods, it was a rare Xiaoice period in history, and winter not only came a month earlier, but also ended a month later.

It wasn't until most of February that there was a little spring on the construction site at the foot of Niutou Mountain.

The snow and ice melted into streams, and weeds began to sprout from the ground.

For a month and a half, Wen Tiren and Fan Jingwen sat in Hangzhou and successively transferred more than 100,000 stone of grain to Cai Maode, that is, about more than one million catties of grain, so that the siege of Niutou Mountain could be carried out smoothly.

Of course, this grain was not only for the 13,000-strong army of Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, but also for the tens of thousands of young and strong laborers recruited by the prefectures and counties of Huzhou to dig the long trenches.

These grains are not all the materials consumed by Cai Maode at the foot of Niutou Mountain, and the other one-third of the food materials and so on are all donations from the gentry in various counties of Huzhou Prefecture.

Finally, at the end of February, under the repeated urging of Wen Tiren, Cai Maode took Zhang Cunren and others to finally supervise the troops, township soldiers and people of the various ministries and guards, dug a long trench with a length of 36 miles, and on the east side of the long trench, used the excavated soil and stone to build a wall with a top width of three feet and a height of five feet.