Aparicio Saravia was born in 1856 in Cerro Largo, the fourth of thirteen children of a Brazilian immigrant family whose lands straddled the frontier with Rio Grande do Sul. He and his brother Gumercindo became, almost by accident, the last of the gaucho caudillos - leaders who summoned ranch hands and frontier horsemen to fight for the Blanco cause against the government in Montevideo. Theirs were hopeless wars in a literal sense: columns of lancers on horseback charging soldiers armed with Mausers and field guns. Historian John Charles Chasteen titled his study of these men 'Heroes on Horseback,' and the phrase captures the doomed romance of a way of war already vanishing as Saravia rode to Masoller.

Masoller is a village in northern Uruguay, hard against the Brazilian line, and that nearness shaped everything that followed. When the wounded Saravia withdrew from the field, he fled across the frontier into Brazil. The victorious Colorado forces chose not to pursue him. They had resolved to keep the conflict inside Uruguay's borders and avoid any incident with the Brazilian government, so the most wanted man in the country slipped beyond their reach. The restraint changed nothing in the end. Saravia died of his wound on 10 September 1904, in Brazil, nine days after the bullet found him - and the revolt died with its leader.

What the gauchos lost at Masoller, the modern Uruguayan state won. The battle consolidated the presidency of José Batlle y Ordóñez, the liberal reformer whose name would become shorthand for the country's transformation into one of Latin America's most progressive democracies. Batlle's Uruguay built schools, pensions, and a secular public life that set it apart from its neighbors for generations. The caudillo on horseback gave way to the politician at the ballot box. It is hard to stand on this empty borderland now and picture the cavalry charge that turned a nation's history - but the quiet here is exactly the point. The wars simply stopped.

Masoller earned a strange second life in literature. Jorge Luis Borges set his story 'La otra muerte,' from the collection 'El Aleph,' on this very battlefield. Its subject is a man named Pedro Damián, remembered first as a coward who fled the cannon fire here and lived out his days as a near-hermit - and then, impossibly, remembered as a hero who died charging at the front of the same battle in 1904. Borges chose Masoller deliberately, an event read as having determined the course of twentieth-century Uruguay, to ask whether a single moment can rewrite an infinite number of destinies. Memory, in his telling, is as contested as the ground itself.