All right, I got a question for you. What would you be willing to do? How far would you be willing to go just to survive?

Well, this week we had this, like, gigantic snowstorm on the East Coast, and it was a bear just walking down my driveway.

I started thinking about people stranded by frozen mother nature, like the Netflix, Society of the Snow, and the Donner Party,

trapped by a mountain blizzard back in 1846.

I'm Patty Steele, blizzards, and cannibalism.

That's next on the backstory.

This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.

The backstory is back.

Did you catch the Netflix movie Society of the Snow a couple of years ago?

It's the true story of a rugby team from Uruguay over 50 years ago,

whose airliner crashed in the snowy mountains of Argentina. Of the 45 passengers

on board, 29 survived the crash, and another 13 died later of injuries and illness. The 16 who made

it out survived by eating their dead teammates. Not the first story of its kind, it turns out. And all these folks had to

ask themselves the difficult question, how far am I willing to go to survive? It's the 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

Reed's 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. But timing was everything in those days.

They had to leave early enough to make it past the western mountain ranges before winter,

but late enough to avoid getting bogged down in the mud from spring rains. 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.

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