At one point his Modoc Girlfriend rescues him from Jail. They use a knife that they serrate to cut the bars. However, at one point soldiers find his girlfriend and he and the other Modoc brave that rescued him and the girlfriend and the brave are shot trying to cross the Sacramento River on horses. He builds a funeral pyre and cremates her but he doesn't find the body of the brave.
You can see how someone who is intelligent enough to study another culture and comes to love them is very very different than the average person who sees them (Native Americans) as either tame or wild (sort of like wild animals). So, the attitude prevalent then was this. If you see people as animals then animals that are wild you might feel you have permission to shoot them much like a bear or cougar or even raccoon that becomes a problem to you and your family.
So, it wasn't so much that people in the 1800s were Anti-Native American it was that they didn't really understand them or their needs very much because of coming from an entirely different cultural continuum by mostly being white and more European by culture.
It's similar to when I grew up in the 1950s when most people hadn't even been to high school or graduated High School. When people's view of the world is that narrow (from a lack of experience) the results are predictable, especially from the point of view of today.
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