Did you catch Society of the Snow on Netflix?

Of course, it's the true story of a rugby team from Uruguay 50 years ago whose airliner crashed in the snowy mountains of Argentina.

They survived by eating their dead teammates.

Well, in 1846, the Donner Party of Pioneers headed west and were stranded for the winter in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

They had an even more gruesome survival story.

I'm Patty Steele.

What would you do next on the backstory?

The backstory is back.

If you watch the recent Netflix hit movie Society of the Snow, maybe you asked

yourself what you'd be willing to do to survive. It's a true story about a rugby team from

Uruguay in 1972, whose plane crashes in the Andes Mountains and cannibalism becomes the only

way to survive. It's the ultimate taboo. But it begs the question,

would you be committed to survival at any cost? Well, that's a question that faced a group of

pioneers who took off from Illinois and Missouri in the 1840s and headed west. Two families,

the Donners headed by George Donner and the Re, headed by James Reed, hit the trail with nine covered wagons.

It was an incredibly difficult undertaking. They expected to cover as much as 15 miles a day, getting to California in four to six months.

The timing was everything. They had to leave early enough to make

it past the western mountain ranges before winter set in and late enough to avoid getting

bogged down in the mud from spring rains. And they also had to make sure to travel when

there was still enough spring grass for their cattle and horses to feed on along the way.

Okay, it's May 12, 1846. The two families, around 32 people in all, with everything they owned,

packed into those wagons, left for a new life in the West. They eventually met up with other folks looking for a new life,

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