Chapter 31 (1/2)

This hill is not all salt mountain, because in the west of the hill, there are more plants on the hills closely connected with this hill. Obviously, those hills are normal mountains.

Riding around the hill, the stone bear found pieces of limestone at the foot of the hill.

This can be called ”double happiness”.

The emergence of coal, kaolin and limestone has provided the most basic conditions for iron smelting. As long as iron ore can be found, even with the clay blast furnace of the Communist era, as long as iron can be smelted, there will be no problem in steelmaking.

With kaolin, you can make refractory bricks, and then you can build clay blast furnace. With coal, limestone and iron ore, you can successfully smelt iron.

At the same time of smelting iron, coke can be made in local kilns. As long as you make coke and pig iron, you can make real steel by frying steel!

This is the necessary step to smelt iron ore into steel! This is also the best and most efficient way of steelmaking before the emergence of open hearth.

In this era, coke steelmaking has only appeared in Britain for half a century, and the British people are very strict about the method of coke steelmaking, so this method has not been thoroughly spread in the European continent.

However, I'm afraid the king of the British Empire did not expect that there would be a monster in North America on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, who was born to know these steelmaking methods

However, compared with steelmaking, what makes stone bear most happy is the discovery of this small salt mountain.

As a matter of fact, the reserves of salt on the earth are enormous. Even if we don't mention sea salt, the well salt, rock salt and lake salt produced on the land alone will be enough for the whole mankind to eat for thousands of years.

However, apart from sea salt, most of the salt produced on land contains a lot of impurities, most of which can't be eaten directly. It needs to be processed before it can be eaten. Otherwise, the taste is bad. That thing can really poison people.

This is also the fundamental reason why there are a lot of well salt and rock salt in Europe, and the output of edible salt is still so small.

In this era, besides boiling salt to remove those toxic impurities, other methods of refining salt can not!

It's like the East Cherokee people send caravans protected by many soldiers every year to the pamangi people living in the eastern coastal areas to exchange their fur and grain for salt - the pamangi people living in the later generation of Norfolk have long mastered the method of drying sea salt.

It's no exaggeration to say that once the pamangis cut off the salt supply to the East Cherokees and the chekasa, the two Indian tribes who wanted to turn human brains into dog brains would immediately be in great trouble.

And there is a great possibility that the two tribes that had been hostile for hundreds of years would unite to destroy the pamangis because of salt!

Under the threat of survival, hatred is nothing at all!

As long as the salt of this small salt mountain is refined, the gaoshu tribe will have more strategic materials.