On February 6 the voyagers saw before them the broad current of the Mississippi, full of floating ice. For a long distance they paddled their canoes down the mighty current without adventure. As they fared on day by day, they realized that they were entering a summer land. The warm air and hazy sunlight and opening flowers were in delightful contrast with the ice and snow from which they had emerged. Once {251} there seemed to be danger of an attack from Indians whose war-drum they could hear beating. A fog lifted, and the Indians, looking across the river, saw the Frenchmen at work building a fort. Peace signals were displayed from both sides, and soon the white men and their Indian allies from rugged New England were hobnobbing in the friendliest way with these dusky denizens of the southwestern woods. These were a band of the Arkansas, the same people who had treated Joliet and Marquette so handsomely. They lavished every kind attention on their guests and kept them three days. The friar, Membre, who chronicled the expedition, describes them as "gay, civil, and free-hearted, exceedingly well-formed and with all so modest that not one of them would take the liberty to enter our hut, but all stood quietly at the door." He adds, "we did not lose the value of a pin while we were among them." La Salle had now reached the furthest point of Joliet and Marquette's exploration. He reared a cross, took possession of the country in his master's name, and pushed on. On the western side of the river they visited the home of the Taensas Indians and were amazed at the degree {252} of social advancement which they found among them. There were square dwellings, built of sun-baked mud mixed with straw, and arranged in regular order around an open area; and the King was attended by a council of sixty grave old men wearing white cloaks of the fine inner fibre of mulberry bark. The temple was a large structure, full of a dim, mysterious gloom, within which burned a sacred fire, as an emblem of the sun, watched and kept up unceasingly by two aged priests. Altogether, the customs and social condition of these people were more like those of the ancient Peruvians and Mexicans than those of the wild tribes with whom the explorers were familiar. When the chief visited La Salle he came in great state, preceded by women who bore white fans, and wearing a disk of burnished copper,--probably to indicate that he was a child of the Sun, for the royal family claimed this high lineage. The next day the Frenchmen visited a kindred tribe, the Natchez, among whom they observed similar usages. They were hospitably entertained and spent the night in their villages. Their chief town was some miles distant, near the site of the {253} city of Natchez. Here again La Salle planted a cross, less as a symbol of Christianity than of French occupation.[3]