Lautaro was perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three when he died, and already a legend. Born around 1534, he had been seized by the Spanish in his youth and held in the service of Valdivia himself. Most captives in that position vanished into anonymous labor. Lautaro instead studied the enemy from the inside, then slipped away in 1552 to tell his people a dangerous truth: the invaders were not gods. The horses could be killed. The men could be beaten. As toqui, the war leader chosen by his people, he devised tactics that exploited every Spanish weakness, and in December 1553 at the Battle of Tucapel his warriors captured and killed Valdivia. The conqueror of Chile fell to a man who had once carried his saddle.

Four years of war followed. By early 1557 the Spanish governor Francisco de Villagra had marched south, leaving Santiago lightly defended, and Lautaro saw his opening. He gathered an army that swelled toward ten thousand men and pushed north toward the colonial capital, intending to drive the Spanish from the land entirely. But the campaign carried a tragedy of its own making. Along the Mataquito, Lautaro's forces treated the local Indigenous people harshly, in much the same way the Spanish treated those they conquered. The mistreatment bred resentment. After a bitter quarrel, many of his allies and even some of his own Mapuche abandoned him. He withdrew up the river and built a fortified camp, not knowing that the people he had wronged would soon guide his enemies to its gate.

Villagra learned the camp's location from local Indigenous people who had suffered under Lautaro, and he moved fast. With about 120 Spaniards, fifty-seven horsemen, a handful of arquebusiers, and more than four hundred Indigenous auxiliaries known as yanakuna, he made a night march over the hills of Caune to the ridge above the camp. At first light the cavalry charged down the slope while infantry burst through the stockade. Lautaro was struck down almost at once, killed as he emerged from the doorway of his ruca, his dwelling. He never had the chance to fight.

What happened next is the part the chroniclers could not quite explain away. With their toqui dead in the first moments, the Mapuche did not break. They fought on for some six hours, holding the camp against horsemen and guns long after the battle was lost, until between 250 and 500 of them lay dead. They were not statistics to the people who loved them; they were sons, husbands, and brothers who chose to stand. The Spanish carried Lautaro's head back to Santiago and displayed it in the plaza, a grim warning meant to end resistance. It did not. The Arauco War would grind on for generations, and the Mapuche would remain unconquered through the entire Spanish colonial era. Lautaro became, and remains, a national hero in Chile, his name carried by towns, ships, and a monument in nearby Curicó.