Little House on the Prairie’s Mary Ingalls: The Heartbreaking True Story Behind Her Tragic Blindness
Laura knew the real cause. Find out why her daughter helped rewrite history for readers
Key Takeaways
- Mary Ingalls didn't go blind from scarlet fever and her true suffering was great.
- Laura's original manuscript revealed the family thought Mary would die.
- Mary excelled at Iowa College for the Blind and lived independently until age 63.
If you grew up reading the Little House on the Prairie book series or watching the beloved TV series about a pioneer family’s hardscrabble life on the American frontier, you likely recall the tale author Laura Ingalls Wilder told of her older sister Mary losing her vision after a bout of scarlet fever. But did Mary Ingalls really go blind in that way? There has actually been scientific research done on the topic, and the answer is almost certainly no.
What many Little House fans don’t realize is that when Ingalls Wilder first wrote her life, publishers rejected her autobiographical manuscript for being too harsh. So her daughter Rose Wilder Lane helped fictionalize the tale, crafting it for children and commercial appeal, not historical accuracy. When the TV series launched in 1974, the show’s writers took even more liberties.
Yet that doesn’t mean the truth was lost. In 2014, South Oregon University historian Pamela Smith Hill helped annotate and publish Laura’s original manuscript with the title Pioneer Girl. And, among many fascinating revelations, it sheds light on how Mary’s life suddenly descended into darkness.
The illness struck without warning and doctors were powerless
In the spring of 1879, 14-year-old Mary “was taken suddenly sick with a pain in her head and grew worse quickly. She was delirious with an awful fever. We feared for several days that she would not get well,” Laura wrote. Laura vividly recounted the morning she looked at her sister and saw “one side of her face drawn out of shape.” Their mother Caroline explained Mary had suffered a stroke.
While Mary did slowly regain strength over the following weeks, her vision steadily faded. A doctor delivered the devastating verdict: “The nerves of her eyes had had the worst of the stroke and were dying—nothing could be done.” Charles Ingalls later took Mary to a specialist in Chicago, who confirmed there was no hope of recovery.
So what really caused Mary Ingalls’s blindness—and why was the story changed?
Little House on the Prairie fan Beth Tarini, MD, a professor of pediatrics at George Washington University, began wondering about Mary’s condition while she was still in medical school. “I would ask other doctors, but no one could give me a definitive answer,” she told CBS News. “So I started researching it.”
She eventually assembled a team to comb through biographical documents, local newspaper accounts, school registries and Laura’s private letters and memoirs. What they found was striking: The Pioneer Girl manuscript makes no mention whatsoever of scarlet fever. And in a 1937 letter to her daughter Rose, Laura described Mary’s illness as “spinal meningitis” and “some sort of spinal sickness.” Meanwhile, the pupils’ register at the Iowa College for the Blind, where Mary later studied, listed her cause of blindness plainly as “brain fever.”
After continued analysis, Dr. Tarini published a 2013 study in the journal Pediatrics concluding that the true culprit was almost certainly viral meningoencephalitis—an inflammation of the brain and the membranes surrounding it.
So why blame scarlet fever? Turns out, scarlet fever was a household terror of the era, killing up to 30 percent of the children infected. It was so culturally embedded that it also appeared as a theme in Little Women and Frankenstein. People feared it and were obsessed with it. Some researchers believe scarlet fever was added as Laura and her daughter Rose worked to make Laura’s story more marketable. Alternately, the pair “may have revised her writings to identify scarlet fever as Mary’s illness because it was so familiar to people,” Little House historian Sarah Allexan suggested to CBS News.
The TV series vs. real life
A local newspaper, in its April 14, 1879 issue, reported: “Miss Mary Ingalls has been confined to her bed about ten days with severe head ache. It was feared that hemorrhage of the brain had set in—one side of her face became partially paralyzed. She is now slowly convalescing.” A month later the same paper noted that “Miss Mary Ingalls is still confined to her bed, and at times her sufferings are great.”
The TV series starring Melissa Sue Anderson took the scarlet fever explanation and dramatized it further, but also downplayed a lot of Mary’s suffering. Though the portrayal bore only a loose resemblance to what the real Mary endured, “I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away,” parts one and two became a ratings sensation. Part one was the second highest rated show in the country the week it aired in 1978, while part two shot to number one.
Netflix’s new Little House on the Prairie reboot takes a different approach. Mary, played by Skywalker Hughes, is introduced as intelligent, bookish and somewhat cautious. Her visual impairment is a gradual, ongoing part of her life rather than a sudden tragedy. So a bit closer to the truth.
Mary’s remarkable life after blindness
What happened next is its own extraordinary story. In 1881, two years after losing her sight, 16-year-old Mary enrolled at the Iowa College for the Blind in Vinton, Iowa, with tuition paid by Dakota Territory. She excelled, earning top marks, mastering music and learning to sew, knit and do beadwork. She graduated in 1889 at age 24.
Laura, who worked extra jobs to help cover Mary’s expenses, wrote that on Mary’s first visit home from school, she moved around the house “gay and confident”—a transformation that moved the whole family. Mary returned to De Smet, South Dakota, to live with her parents, contributing to the family income with her handwork.
Though Mary’s character married in the TV series, Mary never wed in real life. She died on October 20, 1928, at age 63, and was buried beside her parents in De Smet Cemetery in De Smet, South Dakota. The cemetery is open to the public, and the Ingalls family plot is a popular destination for Little House on the Prairie fans who want to pay their respects to a woman who captured hearts with her spirit and resiliency.
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