Several times in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, she mentions that her younger sister Carrie was not very strong; she was undersized, pale, tired easily, and at one point in Little Town on the Prairie she darn near faints at the blackboard at school.
So my question is, was she ill or just nervous? Her Wikipedia entry mentions that she died of diabetes (as did little sister Grace) but I don’t think that explains her peakedness as a child; had she had juvenile diabetes I think the symptoms would have been fairly obvious. I’ve always suspected she was anemic, but does anyone know for sure?
I’m not 100% sure, but it was implied that she was suffering from the effects of malnutrition. Anemia is probably a fairly good guess. (I figure that she also had migraines–her tendency toward bad headaches was mentioned.) They’d had so little to eat for so long, and the book does say that she wasn’t recovering from the hard winter the way that she should have.
I can think of two possible culprits that might explain why the Hard Winter was so much worse for Carrie than for the others:
In Little House on the Prairie, we’re told that the whole family contracted malaria. The real Carrie Ingalls was born when the family was in Kansas (not actually “Indian Territory” as the book says), so either Caroline was pregnant or Carrie was a small baby when they fell ill. She may have continued to suffer from that for years afterwards, maybe her whole life.
At the start of On the Shores of Silver Lake, we learn that most of the family, including Carrie, has been ill with scarlet fever. If it was the same disease we call scarlet fever today (caused by a strep A infection), that can turn into rheumatic fever, which is truly nasty stuff. A weakened heart would explain her fatigue and headaches pretty well, I think.
No, Carrie was not born or conceived in Kansas. Laura fudged the timeline a bit. IRL, the Ingalls returned to Wisconsin after they were forced out of Kansas, which explains both Carrie’s absence during the malaria sequence, and Laura’s detailed memories of events in the Big Woods that the book says happened when she was five. More likely the Strep A or anemia explanations.