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Native American men and women now faced machine guns, cannons, army troops, and the diseases the newcomers brought with them. They fought those enemies with all the energy they had, which meant that peaceful settlers became victims of angry Indians  . And that led to intense hatreds and revenge raids on both sides  . The Indians especially hated the iron horses—the great trains that thundered across their hunting grounds on the new transcontinental tracks, bearing gun-toting soldiers and settlers . Crazy Horse was a leader among the Sioux Indians. He spoke these words to a white agent: "We had buffalo for food, and their hides for clothing and for our teepees. We preferred hunting to a life of idleness on the reservation, where we were driven against our will. We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone ."
The struggle was fierce while it lasted . In 1876, the Civil War hero Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer paid no attention to his orders or to his scouts' reports and led 266 men against thousands of Cheyenne and Sioux Indians gathered at the Little Bighorn River in central Montana. Crazy Horse was among them. The battle was called Custer's Last Stand , and it was a massacre of the whites . The only U.S. Army survivor was a horse named Comanche. Crazy Horse later narrated his version of the battle:  "They say we massacred Custer, the Long Hair. But he would have done the same thing to us had we not defended ourselves and fought to the last ."
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