DCHP-1 Online

wintering partner cf. Cdn F hivernant, q.v. Fur Trade, Hist.

• 1 a stock-holding partner in the Montreal-based fur companies, especially the North West Company who represented the company the year round at the trading posts in the fur country.

  See also: agent (def. 2)  bourgeois (def. 2a)  master pedlar  North West Company  partner  proprietor  winterer (def. 2b)  

  • 1802, 1890  The said partners shall assume and be stiled Agents of the North West Company and shall be aided and assisted in all occasions by the Wintering partners whose duty it shall also be to attend in a particular manner to the Business in their respective Departments.
  • 1834  (1948)  I think I have heard it said that they belonged to the Wintering partners of the old North West Company.
  • 1940  Within the palisade were several small houses, one, we discovered later, for the wintering partner (as the North West Company called those who, in the Hudson's Bay, were styled factors). . . .
  • 1963  Wills . . . was one of the six wintering partners of this concern [XY Co.]. . . .

• 2 a comparable officer in the Hudson's Bay Company. See 1905 quote.

  See also: bourgeois (def. 2b)  winterer (def. 2c)  

  • 1905  (1954)  The chief factors and chief traders . . . were known as the "Wintering Partners" of the company. The profits of the fur trade were divided into 100 parts. Of these, 60 parts were appropriated to the stockholders and 40 to the "Wintering Partners." These last were divided into 85 shares, of which two were held by each chief factor and one by each chief trader. The "clerks" . . . were paid by salary.
  • 1921  The commissioned officers in the country were called "Wintering Partners" and received among them two-fifths of the net profits of the concern.
  • 1954  It was a sad blow to the prestige of the officers when in 1887, after several years of hard times during which the profits received by the "wintering partners" were small, they decided to go on a regular salary basis.
  • 1963  The Hudson's Bay Company people, whom I took to be the equivalent of the old wintering partners, disappointed me by not staging one of the wild debauches I had read about in northern novels.