Southward from Peru marched the bold Valdivia with two hundred Spaniards
at his back. With them as aids to conquest was brought a considerable
force of Peruvians; also priests and women, for he proposed to settle and
hold the land as his own after he had conquered it. Six hundred miles
southward he went, fighting the hostile natives at every step, and on the
14th of February, 1541, stopped and laid the foundations of a town which
he named St. Jago. This still stands as the modern Santiago, a city of
three hundred thousand souls.
We do not propose to tell the story of Valdivia's wars with the many
tribes of Chili. He was in that land nine years before his conquests
brought him to the Biobio and the land of the Araucanians, with whom alone
we are concerned. On the coast near the mouth of this river he founded a
new town, which he named Concepcion, and made this the basis of an
invasion of the land of the Araucanians, whom he proposed to subdue.
As it happened, the Araucanian leader at this time was a man with the body
of a giant and the soul of a dwarf.
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