"This time, in 1540, the safer way by the coast desert was taken, and with a mere handful of 150 Spanish soldiers, but accompanied by a great host of Indians, Valdivia marched through the interminable valley, carrying with him rapine and oppression for the gold he coveted. A great pitched battle for a time, early in 1541, decided the supremacy of the white men, and Valdivia, with superhuman energy and cruelty unexampled, set tens of thousands of Indians to work washing auriferous sand, delving in mines, cutting roads that still exist, and clearing the way for the advance of the Spaniards southward. In a lovely, fertile, elevated plain, with the eternal snow-capped Andes looking down upon it, Valdivia founded the capital of his new domain, the city of Santiago, on the morrow of his victory in February 1541, and from the height of St. Lucia above, upon the spot where the conqueror overlooked the building of his city, his gallant figure in bronze still dominates the fair scene of his prowess. "Fighting almost constantly for years, Valdivia, with ever-growing forces, pushed farther south. Valparaiso was founded in 1544 as the main seaport for the capital, and two years afterwards the conqueror crossed the Biobio River and entered the fertile agricultural and pastoral country of the Araucanians. Refined and cultivated as the Incas of the north had been, these stalwart Indians of the temperate south surpassed them in the sterner virtues and in the arts of war. Tales of their lofty stature and mighty strength grew with the telling, and the Spaniards acknowledged that at last they had met in America a people who were more than their match. Concepcion, Talcahuano, Imperial, Valdivia, one city after the other rose in this land of forests and fighters, to be destroyed again and again, only to be rebuilt. Gold in abundance, surpassing the visions even of the Spaniards, was to be had for the digging or washing, but the Indians would only dig or wash the metal whilst a white man with a harquebus stood over them, and not always then. Poison and treachery were common to both sides, and cruelty surpassed itself. In one battle Valdivia cut off the hands and noses of hundreds of Indian prisoners and sent them back as an object lesson, and the Araucanians, with devilish irony, killed the Spaniards by pouring molten gold down their throats.