The name carries the whole emotion of the event. In the everyday Spanish of the River Plate, redota was a deformation of derrota - a word that means at once a defeat, a rout, and a route or path. So the redota was all of those things braided together: the road they walked, the flight they were forced into, and the defeat they refused to call by any softer name. It captured the contradiction the people lived - the sacrifice, the helplessness, and the strange pride of choosing exile over submission. They did not pretend they were marching to victory. They named their journey for the bitterness it was, and walked anyway.

This was not an army on the move so much as an entire society. Contemporary accounts describe an immense caravan: men, women, children, and the elderly, with cattle and horses, household goods, even chickens and dogs, trailing behind the militia columns. The march began on 23 October 1811 and crept north and west across the land, fording one stream after another - Santa Lucía, Arroyo Grande, the Río Negro, the Queguay - through the long, wet spring. A Paraguayan traveler who saw the camp marveled that families living under their wagons and beneath the trees, soaked by bad weather, did so with such good will and contentment that it stirred his admiration.

By December the great column reached the Uruguay River and began crossing toward the western bank. There, on the Ayuí stream near Salto, the people made their long encampment - a temporary city in the woods that gathered, by some estimates, around ten thousand souls. They stayed for months, an entire displaced population waiting in the open while Artigas held the cause together. It was here, in the mud and patience of Ayuí, that a scattered rural people began to feel themselves a single nation with a single leader. The federalist ideals Artigas championed - of autonomy and the dignity of common people - were forged as much in this camp as on any battlefield.

What made thousands abandon their homes for one leader? José Artigas had been a frontier soldier, a man who knew the land and its gaucho horsemen intimately, and who had broken with Spain to fight for a different kind of country - one of provincial autonomy and the dignity of ordinary people. He did not promise comfort or quick victory. He offered a cause. The redota was the moment that cause became flesh: a whole population voting with their feet, choosing hardship and Artigas over the return of colonial rule. The trust it took to follow him into the wilderness is the reason Uruguayans still call him the father of their nation, and why his stern, bearded face looks out from their money and their monuments today.

The exodus passed into legend, and Artigas became the father of Uruguayan independence, his image now on its coins and in its squares. In 2011, on the two-hundredth anniversary, Uruguayans retraced the redota across their country, turning the old route of defeat into a pilgrimage of pride. The path the travelers can follow today threads from Montevideo through San José, Mercedes, Fray Bentos, Paysandú, and Salto - past abandoned rail stations, thermal springs, and quiet river towns - shadowing the way thousands once walked behind their wagons. The terrain is rough and the route deliberately obscure, but that is fitting. The redota was never meant to be easy.