Outcast Beavers

A fanciful notion prevails among the Indians, that if young beavers... fail to pair, they are allowed to return to the parent lodge and remain until the ensuing summer; but as a mark of parental disapprobation, for their ill matrimonial success, they are required to do the work of repairing the dam.  There is another ramification of the same conceit, to the effect that if they fail again to mate in the ensuing summer, they are not allowed to return a second time, but that they become from thenceforth 'outcast' beavers.  The existence of such a class is believed in, to some extent, both by the Indians and trappers, and the two notions together furnish the only foundation for the fiction at one time believed that there was a class of slave beavers.  


Lewis Henry Morgan
The American Beaver and His Works (1868)