DCHP-1 Online

pack ((n.))

• 1a n. Fur Trade, Hist. a pack of goods or furs weighing about 90 pounds.

  See also: piece  

  • 1774  (1934)  By the Masters account . . . 65 or 70 Packs or Caggs, called by them Pieces, are put on board each Canoe. . . .
  • 1794  (1889)  Paid Mary . . . for lacing 14 pairs of snowshoes, and then buffalo skins she dressed ad cut into cords for the packs, and for cutting ten more skins into thongs that were dressed to her hand, 15 plues.
  • 1961  All the trading goods and the furs had been made up into "pièces," each weighing about ninety pounds. A voyageur quickly slung one of these on his back, with a tumpline over his forehe4ad pulling his head back. Into the hollow thus formed he tossed a second ninety-pound pack which pushed his head forward.

• 1b n. Fur Trade a bundle of furs, usually 90 pounds, especially one baled in a pack press, and tagged and numbered as to contents and year.

  See also: package (def. 2)  pack press  

  • 1784  (1790)  Sixty packs has been made this winter in his quarter, but four of his men have been eat by the savages through extremity of hunger.
  • 1896  For many years the town will be . . . the outlet for the numberless "packs" fathered by the great Hudson's Bay Company.
  • 1961  [He] fined him thirty packs of beaver, which was just the quantity he had.

• 2 n. an expanse of ice made up of many small pans or floes tightly packed together.

  See also: ice-pack  

  • 1850  (1851)  A pack is a body of drift-ice, of such magnitude that its extent is not discernible. A pack is open when the pieces of ice, though very near to each other, do not generally touch, or close when the pieces are in complete contact.
  • 1962  We crashed headlong into the pack and hoped to drift through.