Crossword-Solution: WINTERERS 9 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 12

The free men or "winterers" are, strictly speaking, free traders, but they dispose of the greater portion of their furs, robes, etc., to the Company.

One perceives an astonishing difference between these two camps, which are composed sometimes of three or four hundred men each; that of the pork-eaters is always dirty and disorderly, while that of the winterers is clean and neat.

This gentleman seems equal to all the hardships and privations of a voyageur's life, having performed the journey from Athabasca hither, a distance of at least six hundred miles, on snow-shoes, without appearing to have suffered any inconvenience from it; thus proving himself the ablest _mangeur de lard_ we have had in the country for a number of years: there are many of our old winterers who would have been glad to excuse themselves if required to undertake such a journey.

They were termed the winterers, in opposition to the captains and sailors who visited the colony for the purpose of trading only.

The experienced voyageurs who spent the winters in the woods were called _hivernans_, or winterers, or sometimes _hommes du nord_; while the inexperienced, those who simply made the trip from Montreal to the outlying depots and return, were contemptuously dubbed _mangeurs de lard_,[198] "pork-eaters," because their pampered appetites demanded peas and pork rather than hulled corn and tallow.