In 'La Vuelta de Martín Fierro', we discover that their hope of a better life is promptly and bitterly disappointed. The two set out to live among the natives, hoping to find a better life there. In battle with them, he acquires a companion: one Sergeant Cruz, inspired by Fierro's bravery in resistance, defects and joins him mid-battle. Fierro becomes an outlaw pursued by the police militia. The narration of another knife fight suggests by its lack of detail that it is one of many. He deliberately provokes an affair of honor by insulting a black woman in a bar in the knife duel that ensues, he kills her male companion. He deserts and tries to return to his home, but discovers that his house, farm, and family are gone. His life of poverty on the pampas is somewhat romanticized his military experiences are not. In 'El Gaucho Martín Fierro', the eponymous protagonist is an impoverished gaucho who has been drafted to serve at a border fort, defending the Argentine inner frontier against the Native Peoples. It has appeared in literally hundreds of editions and has been translated into over 70 languages, all done by different publishers. The poem, written in a Spanish that evokes rural Argentina, is widely seen as the pinnacle of the genre of 'gauchesque' poetry (poems centered around the life of the gaucho, written in a style that evokes the rural Argentine ballads known as payadas) and a touchstone of Argentine national identity. The poem supplied a historical link to the gauchos' contribution to the national development of Argentina, for the gaucho had played a major role in Argentina's independence from Spain. The poem was originally published in two parts, El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) and La Vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879). Martín Fierro is a 2,316 line epic poem by the Argentine writer José Hernández.

Martín Fierro by José Hernández