In Beaver World by Enos A. Mills

For three hundred years the beaver has been a popular subject for discussion. Fabulous accounts have been given concerning his works, and that which he has done has been exaggerated beyond recognition. Many of the descriptions of him are grotesque, and many accounts of his works are uncanny. His tail has been made to do the work of a pile-driver, and some of the old accounts credit him with driving stakes into the ground that were as large as a man's thigh and five or six feet long. Stories have been told that his tail was used as a trowel in plastering the house and the dam. A few writers have stated that he lived in a three-story lodge.

More than a century ago Audubon called attention to the enormous mass of fabrications that had been written concerning this animal, and in 1771 Samuel Hearne of the Hudson's Bay Company denounced a beaver nature-faker in the following terms: "The compiler of the Wonders of Nature and Art seems to have not only collected all the fictions into which other writers on the subject have run, but has so greatly improved on them that little remains to be added to his account of the beaver beside a vocabulary of their language, a code of their laws, and a sketch of their religion, to make it the most complete natural history of that animal."