ELVIS PRESLEY — WHAT REALLY KILLED THE KING OF ROCK ‘N ROLL?

Elvis Presley suddenly dropped in the bathroom of his Graceland mansion on the afternoon of August 16, 1977. Elvis was rushed to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was pronounced dead, then shipped to the morgue and autopsied the same afternoon. Three days later, the Memphis County coroner issued Elvis Presley’s death certificate stating the cause as hypertensive cardiovascular disease with atherosclerotic heart disease — a heart attack subsequent to high blood pressure and blocked coronary arteries.

It was a rush to judgment. Toxicology results soon identified ten pharmaceutical drugs in Elvis’s system. Codeine was ten times the therapeutic level and the combination of other prescription drugs suggested a poly-pharmacy overdose. This revelation started immediate accusations of a cover-up and conspiracy theories quickly hinted at sinister criminal acts.

Four decades later, modern medicine and forensic science looked at the Presley case facts. The review indicated something entirely different from a heart attack or drug overdose really killed the King of Rock ‘n Roll. It said Elvis Presley accidentally died after long-term complications from earlier traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). TBIs are known as silent, stalking, and patient killers.

Looking back, it’s likely old accidental head injuries triggered events leading to Elvis Presley’s death.

From my experience investigating unexpected and unexplained sudden deaths, the accidental conclusion makes sense when you consider the totality of evidence in Elvis’s death. Setting aside media reports of gross negligence, arm-chair speculation of cover-up, and fan accusations that the King was murdered, there’s a simple and straightforward conclusion based on facts. But before examining the facts and knowing hindsight is 20/20, let’s first look at how coroners conduct sudden and unexplained death investigations.

Coroners are the judge of death. Their responsibility is establishing five main facts surrounding a death. Coroners are not to assign blame or fault. In the Presley case, the five facts determined at the immediate time were:

  1. Identity of Deceased — Elvis Aaron Presley

  2. Time of Death — Approximately 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, August 16, 1977

  3. Place of Death — 3754 Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee

  4. Cause of Death — Heart attack

  5. Means of Death — Chronic heart disease

There’s a distinct difference between Cause of Death and Means of Death. Cause is the actual event. Means is the method in which death happened. Examples are cause being a ruptured aorta with means being a motor vehicle crash, or cause being massive cerebral interruption with means being a gunshot wound to the head.

Once the facts are known, it’s the coroner’s duty to classify the Manner of Death. There are five universal manner of death classifications:

  • Natural

  • Homicide

  • Suicide

  • Accidental

  • Undetermined

Elvis Presley’s death was ruled a natural event, thought at the time being an acute cardiac event from existing cardiovascular disease. If the coroner determined Elvis died from a drug overdose, the ruling would have been accidental. No one ever claimed it was suicide or homicide.

One principle of death investigation is to look for antecedent evidence—preexisting conditions which contributed to the death mechanism or was responsible for causing or continuing a chain of events that led to the death.

Another principle of death investigation is examining the cornerstone triangle of Scene—Body—History. This compiles the totality of evidence or case facts. Given that, let’s look at the evidence and case facts in Elvis Presley’s death.

Scene

Elvis was found on his bathroom floor, face down in front of the toilet. It was apparent he’d instantly collapsed from a sitting position and there was no sign of a distress struggle or attempt to summon help. When the paramedics arrived, Elvis was cold, blue and had no vital signs. Rigor mortis had not set in so he’d probably expired within the hour. He was transported by ambulance to Baptist Memorial Hospital where a vain attempt at resuscitation occurred because “he was Elvis”.

ER doctors declared Elvis dead at 3:16 p.m. He was moved to the morgue where an autopsy was promptly performed. There was no suggestion of suicide or foul play so there was no police investigation. The scene wasn’t photographed, nor preserved, and there was no accounting for what medications or other drugs might have been present at Graceland. There’s no official record of the coroner attending the scene as this was considered an in-hospital death and a routine occurrence.

Body

Elvis was in terrible health. His weight was estimated at 350 pounds—gaining 50 lbs. in the last few months of his life. He was virtually non-functional at the end, being mostly bed-ridden and requiring permanent nursing care. Elvis suffered from an enlarged heart which was twice the size of normal and showed advanced evidence of cardiovascular disease in his coronary vessels, aorta, and cerebral arteries—certainly more advanced than a normal 42-year-old would be. His lungs showed signs of emphysema, although he’d never smoked, and his bowel was found to be twice the length of normal with a partially-impacted stool estimated to be four months old.

Elvis also suffered from hypogammaglobulinemia which is an immune disorder, as well as showed evidence of an autoimmune inflammatory disorder.

Toxicology tested positive for ten separate prescription medications but showed negative for illicit drugs and alcohol. The only alarming pharmaceutical indicator, on its own, was codeine at ten times the prescribed manner but not in lethal range.

History

Elvis was born on January 8, 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi and had a twin brother who died at birth. As a youth, Elvis was active and healthy which continued during his time in the U.S. military and all through his early performing stage when he was a bundle of energy. He began experimenting with amphetamines, probably to enhance his performances, but shied from alcohol as it gave him violent tendencies.

In 1967, Elvis came under the primary care of Dr. George Nichopoulos who was well-known to celebrities. Then, Elvis was 32 and weighed 163 pounds. His only known medical ailment was slightly high blood pressure, presumably due to his high-fat diet.

Also in 1967, Elvis’s health took a sudden turn with progressive pain, insomnia, hypertension, lethargy, irrational behavior and immense weight gain. Over his remaining years, Elvis was seen by a number of different doctors and was hospitalized a number of times, all the while resorting to self-medication with a wide assortment of drugs from dozens of sources.

Doctor Nick, as Nichopoulos was called, stayed as Elvis’s personal physician till the end. He was present at the death scene as well as during the autopsy. Doctor Nick concurred with the coroner’s immediate conclusion that the cause of death was a natural cardiac event resulting from an arrhythmia, or sudden interruption of heartbeat, and agreed that Elvis’s death was not due to a drug overdose.

When the toxicology report was released, it came with a qualifier:

Because the tox report appeared to contradict the autopsy report’s stated cardiac cause of death, a prominent toxicologist was asked to review the findings. His opinion was:

“Coupled with this toxicological data are the pathological findings and the reported history that the deceased had been mobile and functional within 8 hours prior to death. Together, all this information points to a conclusion that, whatever tolerance the deceased may have acquired to the many drugs found in his system, the strong probability is that these drugs were the major contribution to his demise.”

The Tennessee Board of Health then investigated Elvis’s death which resulted in proceedings against Doctor Nick.

Evidence showed that during the seven and a half months preceding Elvis’s death—from January 1, 1977, to August 16, 1977—Doctor Nick wrote prescriptions for Elvis for at least 8,805 pills, tablets, vials, and injectables. Going back to January 1975, the count was 19,012.

These numbers might defy belief, but they came from an experienced team of investigators who visited 153 pharmacies and spent 1,090 hours going through 6,570,175 prescriptions and then, with the aid of two secretaries, spent another 1,120 hours organizing the evidence.

The drugs included uppers, downers and powerful painkillers such as Dilaudid, Quaalude, Percodan, Demerol, and Cocaine Hydrochloride in quantities more appropriate for those terminally ill with cancer.

Doctor Nick admitted to this. His defense was because Elvis was so wired on pain killers, he prescribed these medications to keep Elvis away from dangerous street drugs, thereby controlling Elvis’s addiction—addiction being a disease.

One of the defense witnesses was Dr. Forest Torrent, a prominent California physician and a pioneer in the use of opiates in pain treatment who explained how the effects this level of codeine would have contributed to Elvis’s death.

Central to misconduct allegations was the issue of high codeine levels in Elvis at the time of death—codeine being the prime toxicological suspect as the pharmaceutical contributor. It was established that Elvis obtained codeine pills from a dentist the day before his death and Doctor Nick had no knowledge of it.

The jury bought it, and Doctor Nick was absolved of negligence in directly causing Elvis Presley’s fatal event.

Continuing Investigation

Dr. Torrent was convinced there were other contributing factors leading to Elvis’s death. In preparation for Doctor Nick’s trial, Dr. Torrent had access to all of Elvis Presley’s medical records, including the autopsy and toxicology reports. Incidentally, these two reports are the property of the Presley estate and are sealed from public view until 2027, fifty years after Elvis’s death.

Dr. Torrent was intrigued by the sudden change in Elvis starting in 1967. He discovered that while in Los Angeles filming the movie Clambake, Elvis tripped over an electrical cord, fell, and cracked his head on the edge of a porcelain bathtub. Elvis was knocked unconscious and had to be hospitalized. Dr. Torrent found three other incidents where Elvis suffered head blows, and he suspected Elvis suffered from what’s now known as Traumatic Brain Injury—TBI—and that’s what caused progressive ailments leading to his death.

Dr. Torrent released a paper titled Elvis Presley: Head Trauma, Autoimmunity, Pain, and Early Death. It’s a fascinating read—recently published in the credible medical journal Practical Pain Management.

Dr. Torrent builds a theory that Elvis’s bathtub head injury was so severe it jarred brain tissue loose which leaked into his overall blood circulation. Later additional head injuries exacerbated the problem. This is now known to be a leading cause of autoimmune disorder which causes a breakdown of other organs. This progression was unknown in 1967 and Elvis went untreated. Side effects of TBIs include chronic pain, irrational behavior, and severe bodily changes such as obesity and enlarged organs like hearts and bowels.

Today, TBI is a recognized health issue in professional contact sports as well as incidental to motor vehicle accidents and workplace falls or other head injury events.

Dr. Torrent’s hypothesis holds that with a change in mental state and suffering chronic pain, Elvis Presley entered a ten year spiral towards death. He became hopelessly addicted to pain killers, practiced a terribly unhealthy diet and lethargic lifestyle, and resorted to the typical addict’s habit of sneaking a fix wherever he could. This led to early coronary vascular disease and, combined with his escalating weight and pill consumption, Elvis was a heart attack ready to burst.

Recall that I used the term antecedent, like all coroners do when assessing a cause of death. Given Dr. Torrent’s observations—and all the facts compiled from forty years—if I were the coroner completing Elvis Presley’s death certificate today, I’d write it like this:

  1. Identity of Deceased — Elvis Aaron Presley.

  2. Time of Death — Approximately 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, August 16th, 1977.

  3. Place of Death — 3754 Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee.

  4. Cause of Death — Cardiac arrhythmia/myocardial infarction, antecedent to hypertensive cardiovascular disease with atherosclerotic heart disease, antecedent to poly-pharmacy, antecedent to autoimmune inflammatory disorder, antecedent to traumatic brain injury/injuries.

  5. Means of Death — Cumulative head trauma.

Therefore, I’d have to classify Elvis’s death as an accident.

There’s no one to blame—certainly not Elvis. He was a severely injured and sick man. There’s no specific negligence on anyone’s part and definitely no cover-up or conspiracy of a criminal act.

If Dr. Forrest Torrent is right, there simply wasn’t a proper understanding back then to clearly determine what really killed the King of Rock ‘n Roll.

*   *   *

Here’s the link to Dr. Torrent’s article Elvis Presley: Head Trauma, Autoimmunity, Pain, and Early Death as published in Practical Pain Management.

https://www.practicalpainmanagement.com/sites/default/files/images/2013/06/19/1.jpg

Fun Stuff With Elvis & John Fogerty

HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN CONSCIOUSNESS?

What is consciousness? What’s in you—a conscious and thinking entity—perceiving and processing information from a myriad of sources to form intelligent images in your mind? You’re consciously reading this piece, which I consciously put together to explore an area of existence that current science really doesn’t know much about, and I think you’re wondering—has anyone explained what being conscious really is?

Scientists seem to understand macro laws explaining the origin of the universe and greater physical parameters governing the cosmos. Recent science advancements into quantum mechanics shed better light on micro laws ruling sub-atomic behavior. But nowhere has anyone seemed to clearly explain what consciousness truly is and why we—as conscious beings—observe all this.

The question of consciousness intrigues me. So much so, that I’ve read, thought and watched a lot on the subject. From what I’ve picked up, one of today’s leading thinkers about consciousness is Dr. David Chalmers. He’s a likable guy with a curious mind and he’s a Professor of Philosophy at New York University. Dr. Chalmers did a fascinating TED Talk called How Do You Explain Consciousness? Here’s the transcript and link to his thought-evoking talk.

Note to readers: It’s worthwhile to listen to Dr. Chalmers TED Talk while reading this transcript.

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_chalmers_how_do_you_explain_consciousness?language=en

Right now, you have a movie playing inside your head. It’s an amazing multi-track movie. It has 3D vision and surround-sound for what you’re seeing and hearing right now, but that’s just the start of it. Your movie has smell and taste and touch. It has a sense of your body, pain, hunger and orgasms. It has emotions, anger and happiness. It has memories like scenes from your childhood playing before you.

And, it has this constant voiceover narrative in your stream of conscious thinking. At the heart of this movie is you. You’re experiencing all this directly. This movie is your stream of consciousness—the subject of experience of the mind and the world.

Consciousness is one of the fundamental facts of human existence. Each of us is conscious. We all have our own inner movie. That’s you and you and you. There’s nothing we know about more directly. At least, I know about my consciousness directly. I can’t be certain that you guys are conscious.

Consciousness also is what makes life worth living. If we weren’t conscious, nothing in our lives would have meaning or value. But at the same time, it’s the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe. 

Why are we conscious? Why do we have these inner movies? Why aren’t we just robots who process all this input, produce all that output, without experiencing the inner movie at all? Right now, nobody knows the answers to those questions. I’m going to suggest that to integrate consciousness into science then some radical ideas may be needed.

Some people say a science of consciousness is impossible. Science, by its nature, is objective. Consciousness, by its nature, is subjective. So there can never be a science of consciousness.

For much of the 20th century, that view held sway. Psychologists studied behavior objectively. Neuroscientists studied the brain objectively. And nobody even mentioned consciousness. Even 30 years ago, when TED got started, there was very little scientific work on consciousness.

Now, about 20 years ago, all that began to change. Neuroscientists like Francis Crick and physicists like Roger Penrose said, “Now is the time for science to attack consciousness.” And since then, there’s been a real explosion, a flowering of scientific work on consciousness.

All this work has been wonderful. It’s been great. But it also has some fundamental limitations so far. The centerpiece of the science of consciousness in recent years has been the search for correlations—correlations between certain areas of the brain and certain states of consciousness.

We saw some of this kind of work from Nancy Kanwisher and the wonderful work she presented just a few minutes ago. Now we understand much better, for example, the kinds of brain areas that go along with the conscious experience of seeing faces or of feeling pain or of feeling happy.

But this is still a science of correlations. It’s not a science of explanations. We know that these brain areas go along with certain kinds of conscious experience, but we don’t know why they do. I like to put this by saying that this kind of work from neuroscience is answering some of the questions we want answered about consciousness, the questions about what certain brain areas do and what they correlate with.

But, in a certain sense, those are the easy problems. No knock on the neuroscientists. There are no truly easy problems with consciousness. But it doesn’t address the real mystery at the core of this subject. Why is it that all that physical processing in a brain should be accompanied by consciousness at all? Why is there this inner subjective movie? Right now, we don’t really have a bead on that.

And you might say, let’s just give neuroscience a few years. It’ll turn out to be another emergent phenomenon like traffic jams, like hurricanes, like life, and we’ll figure it out. The classical cases of emergence are all cases of emergent behavior, how a traffic jam behaves, how a hurricane functions, how a living organism reproduces and adapts and metabolizes, all questions about objective functioning.

You could apply that to the human brain in explaining some of the behaviors and the functions of the human brain as emergent phenomena. How we walk. How we talk. How we play chess—all these questions about behavior.

But when it comes to consciousness, questions about behavior are among the easy problems. When it comes to the hard problem, that’s the question of why is it that all this behavior is accompanied by subjective experience? And here, the standard paradigm of emergence—even the standard paradigms of neuroscience—don’t really, so far, have that much to say.

Now, I’m a scientific materialist at heart. I want a scientific theory of consciousness that works, and for a long time, I banged my head against the wall looking for a theory of consciousness in purely physical terms that would work. But I eventually came to the conclusion that that just didn’t work for systematic reasons.

It’s a long story, but the core idea is just that what you get from purely reductionist explanations in physical terms, in brain-based terms, is stories about the functioning of a system, its structure, its dynamics, the behavior it produces, great for solving the easy problems—how we behave, how we function but when it comes to subjective experience—why does all this feel like something from the inside?

That’s something fundamentally new, and it’s always a further question. So I think we’re at a kind of impasse here. We’ve got this wonderful great chain of explanation that we’re used to it—where physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains parts of psychology. But consciousness doesn’t seem to fit into this picture.

On the one hand, it’s a datum that we’re conscious. On the other hand, we don’t know how to accommodate it into our scientific view of the world. So I think consciousness right now is a kind of anomaly, one that we need to integrate into our view of the world, but we don’t yet see how. Faced with an anomaly like this, radical ideas may be needed, and I think that we may need one or two ideas that initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness scientifically.

Now, there are a few candidates for what those crazy ideas might be. My friend Dan Dennett has one. His crazy idea is that there is no hard problem of consciousness. The whole idea of the inner subjective movie involves a kind of illusion or confusion.

Actually, all we’ve got to do is explain the objective functions, the behaviors of the brain, and then we’ve explained everything that needs to be explained. Well, I say, more power to him. That’s the kind of radical idea that we need to explore if you want to have a purely reductionist brain-based theory of consciousness.

At the same time, for me and for many other people, that view is a bit too close to simply denying the datum of consciousness to be satisfactory. So I go in a different direction. In the time remaining, I want to explore two crazy ideas that I think may have some promise.

The first crazy idea is that consciousness is fundamental. Physicists sometimes take some aspects of the universe as fundamental building blocks: space and time and mass. They postulate fundamental laws governing them, like the laws of gravity or of quantum mechanics. These fundamental properties and laws aren’t explained in terms of anything more basic. Rather, they’re taken as primitive, and you build up the world from there.

Now sometimes, the list of fundamentals expands. In the 19th century, Maxwell figured out that you can’t explain electromagnetic phenomena in terms of the existing fundamentals—space, time, mass, Newton’s laws—so he postulated fundamental laws of electromagnetism and postulated electric charge as a fundamental element that those laws govern. I think that’s the situation we’re in with consciousness.

If you can’t explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals— space, time, mass, charge—then as a matter of logic, you need to expand the list. The natural thing to do is to postulate consciousness itself as something fundamental, a fundamental building block of nature. This doesn’t mean you suddenly can’t do science with it. This opens up the way for you to do science with it.

What we then need is to study the fundamental laws governing consciousness, the laws that connect consciousness to other fundamentals: space, time, mass, physical processes. Physicists sometimes say that we want fundamental laws so simple that we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. Well, I think something like that is the situation we’re in with consciousness. We want to find fundamental laws so simple we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. We don’t know what those laws are yet, but that’s what we’re after.

The second crazy idea is that consciousness might be universal. Every system might have some degree of consciousness. This view is sometimes called panpsychism—pan for all, psych for mind. The view holds that every system is conscious, not just humans, dogs, mice, flies, but even Rob Knight’s microbes, elementary particles. Even a photon has some degree of consciousness.

The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking. It’s not that a photon is wracked with angst because it’s thinking, “Aww, I’m always buzzing around near the speed of light. I never get to slow down and smell the roses.” No, it’s not like that. But the thought is maybe photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness.

This may sound a bit kooky to you. I mean, why would anyone think such a crazy thing? Some motivation comes from the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental. If it’s fundamental, like space and time and mass, it’s natural to suppose that it might be universal too, the way they are. It’s also worth noting that although the idea seems counterintuitive to us, it’s much less counterintuitive to people from different cultures, where the human mind is seen as much more continuous with nature.

A deeper motivation comes from the idea that perhaps the most simple and powerful way to find fundamental laws connecting consciousness to physical processing is to link consciousness to information. Wherever there’s information processing, there’s consciousness. Complex information processing, like in a human, takes complex consciousness. Simple information processing takes simple consciousness.

A really exciting thing is in recent years a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi, has taken this kind of theory and developed it rigorously with a mathematical theory. He has a mathematical measure of information integration which he calls phi, measuring the amount of information integrated in a system. And he supposes that phi goes along with consciousness.

So in a human brain with an incredibly large amount of information integration it requires a high degree of phi—a whole lot of consciousness. In a mouse with a medium degree of information integration, it still requires a pretty significant, pretty serious amount of consciousness. But as you go down to worms, microbes, particles, the amount of phi falls off. The amount of information integration falls off, but it’s still non-zero.

On Tononi’s theory, there’s still going to be a non-zero degree of consciousness. In effect, he’s proposing a fundamental law of consciousness: high phi, high consciousness. Now, I don’t know if this theory is right, but it’s actually perhaps the leading theory right now in the science of consciousness, and it’s been used to integrate a whole range of scientific data. It does have a nice property that it is, in fact, simple enough that you can write it on the front of a tee-shirt.

Another final motivation is that panpsychism might help us to integrate consciousness into the physical world. Physicists and philosophers have often observed that physics is curiously abstract. It describes the structure of reality using a bunch of equations, but it doesn’t tell us about the reality that underlies it. As Stephen Hawking put it, what puts the fire into the equations?

Well, on the panpsychist view, you can leave the equations of physics as they are, but you can take them to be describing the flux of consciousness. That’s what physics really is ultimately doing—describing the flux of consciousness. On this view, it’s consciousness that puts the fire into the equations. On that view, consciousness doesn’t dangle outside the physical world as some kind of extra. It’s there right at its heart.

I think the panpsychist view has the potential to transfigure our relationship to nature, and it may have some pretty serious social and ethical consequences. Some of these may be counterintuitive. I used to think I shouldn’t eat anything which is conscious, so therefore I should be vegetarian. Now, if you’re a panpsychist and you take that view, you’re going to go very hungry. So I think when you think about it, this tends to transfigure your views, whereas what matters for ethical purposes and moral considerations—not so much the fact of consciousness—but the degree and the complexity of consciousness.

It’s also natural to ask about consciousness in other systems, like computers. What about the artificially intelligent system in the movie Her, Samantha? Is she conscious? Well, if you take the informational, panpsychist view, she certainly has complicated information processing and integration, so the answer is very likely yes, she is conscious. If that’s right, it raises pretty serious ethical issues about both the ethics of developing intelligent computer systems and the ethics of turning them off.

Finally, you might ask about the consciousness of whole groups, the planet. Does Canada have its own consciousness? Or at a more local level, does an integrated group like the audience at a TED conference—are we right now having a collective TED consciousness, an inner movie for this collective TED group which is distinct from the inner movies of each of our parts? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I think it’s at least one worth taking seriously.

Okay, so this panpsychist vision, it is a radical one, and I don’t know that it’s correct. I’m actually more confident about the first crazy idea—that consciousness is fundamental—than about the second one—that it’s universal. I mean, the view raises any number of questions and has any number of challenges, like how do those little bits of consciousness add up to the kind of complex consciousness we know and love.

If we can answer those questions, then I think we’re going to be well on our way to a serious theory of consciousness. If not, well, this is the hardest problem perhaps in science and philosophy. We can’t expect to solve it overnight. But I do think we’re going to figure it out eventually. Understanding consciousness is a real key, I think, both to understanding the universe and to understanding ourselves.

It may just take the right crazy idea.

SUN DANCE – WHY CUSTER REALLY LOST THE BATTLE OF THE LITTLE BIGHORN

The Battle of the Little Bighorn is one of the highest-profile events still shaping North American history. It’s an intensely studied military and social conflict. Yet, the main mystery of what occurred in June of 1876 on the Montana plains seems unsolved. That’s why—not how—the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors were able to strategically and tactically annihilate five United States Army 7th Cavalry companies under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s command and severely maul other soldiers in his regiment.

The core reason—the root cause—of why Custer really lost the Battle of the Little Bighorn hasn’t been identified by historians. They’ve overlooked the Sun Dance effect—the psychological and spiritual impact of the warriors’ cultural unity led by Lakota Chief Sitting Bull. This book outlines why the Lakota Sioux Sun Dance had such a powerful effect on the warriors’ will to win and why this sacred ceremony was the root cause of Custer’s demise.

That about 268 United States Army soldiers and approximately 40-50—maybe as many as 100—Native American civilians died in a brutally violent battle at a valley along the Little Bighorn River is a well-documented historical fact. Over the years, Custermania books saturated the non-fiction historical market. They’ve dissected practically every explainable part of the action.

Except for one. That’s where this book is different. It says Custer lost the Battle of the Little Bighorn because of the immense psychological effect the Native Americans’ ceremonial Sun Dance had on willing their people to win. Mentally, the Sun Dance made the warriors far better prepared to fight than the soldiers. In their minds, the warriors knew they would win. They were convinced that all they had to do was get the job done.

It was an amazing cohesiveness of combined will and unwavering belief that mobilized the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne people to attack the United States Army. They defended themselves, and their very existence, through forced aggression. Nowhere—at any time—did Euro-American authorities expect “savages and inferiors” would be superior in spiritual, strategic and tactical warfighting. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Lt. Col. George Custer, and the 7th Cavalry he controlled, was mentally outclassed and defeated. It was because of the Sun Dance.

The Sioux and the 7th Engage

What happened at the Battle of the Little Bighorn is George Custer headed the U.S. Army 7th Cavalry regiment to find and engage a nomadic camp of Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne Native Americans spiritually invigorated by Hunkpapa Lakota Chief Sitting Bull. The military mission’s objective was to force free-roaming native people onto reservations so European-Americans could steal their remaining land. For the indigenous people, their objective was self-defense and preserving a traditional way of life.

Custer’s cavalry found Sitting Bull’s camp in a valley along the Little Bighorn River. The village was far larger than Custer anticipated—possibly up to 10,000 people. Custer chose to attack immediately—despite the massive population and having no idea of the resolve warriors had to fight—rather than conduct reconnaissance and prepare a proper battle plan or attempt negotiations. Historically, the disastrous results for the soldiers are well-documented. The Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne alliance overwhelmed and soundly defeated the U.S. Army.

The battle circumstances are well recorded, but the real reason—the root cause—why the warriors cohesively gelled and so effectively destroyed Custer’s troops was never distinctly identified. It was ignored. Research through carefully-applied root cause analysis techniques show the enormous positive effect Sitting Bull’s ceremonial Sun Dance—performed shortly before the battle—had on his people. Sitting Bull experienced a victory vision during the Sun Dance that mentally and spiritually prepared his warriors for combat.

Psychologically, the warriors knew there was a fight coming. They were convinced they’d be victorious. It wasn’t only their superior numbers. It wasn’t just the terrain and their home-turf advantage. And, it wasn’t simply their weapons and skillful tactics.

Those were factors, for sure. However, it was their collective mindset—their commitment to engage the soldiers—that gave them overwhelming and superior psychological power. Combined with physical cohesiveness, this allowed the warriors to stunningly defeat the United States Army. The 7th Cavalry soldiers never had a fighting chance.

Two Reasons for this Book

There’s been more written about the Little Bighorn confrontation than any other single American conflict, except possibly the Battle of Gettysburg—certainly more than Pearl Harbor and D-Day. Fascination about the Greasy Grass fight, as Native Americans call it, or Custer’s Last Stand as it’s also known, has never waned. There are plenty of factors for continual interest. Perhaps as many factors as there are books.

So, why this book when so many others exist? Why enter a saturated Custermania market of Little Bighorn writing when so many speculative theories and analytical examinations already exist? There are two reasons.

First, the current plight of the plains indigenous people and other Native Americans is directly attributed to white society actions that caused events like the Battle of the Little Bighorn. As military battles go, the Little Bighorn was a small skirmish though it had crushing ramifications. The battle’s aftermath set the stage for European-American and Native-American relations spanning more than a century.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn still has an impact on today’s Native-Euro American relationships. It’s exceptionally important for people to understand the wrongs inflicted on Native Americans by European-based society. Everyone can benefit from a deeper understanding of other cultures, especially a culture as spiritually advanced as the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne were in the nineteenth century. That’s this book’s primary purpose.

Secondly, the core reason—the root cause—of why Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry lost the Battle of the Little Bighorn has never been precisely identified and articulated. Finding the root cause is vital as it solves a long-standing historical mystery and resolves many misconceptions. It produces a better understanding of this high-profile event and a greater appreciation for Native American culture.

Historians focus on issues like how drastically outnumbered Custer was and how he charged an attack without sufficient intelligence to know the terrain and his odds. Often, the main reason cited for Custer’s defeat is because he divided his command into smaller units unable to support one another. Poor communication between soldier groups under Custer’s command is another identified downfall.

Many suggest Custer’s ego played a big role in this recklessness—how his lust for glory overshadowed his caution and leadership responsibility to protect his command. Historians and Custer buffs also identify how regiment infighting, hunger and malnutrition, fatigue, fear, confusion and chaos, drunkenness, lack of discipline, low morale, poor training and weapons malfunction contributed to Custer’s defeat. Some even suggest Custer disobeyed orders.

All these factors were likely influences on the battle’s outcome. Probably most, combined, contributed to the 7th’s defeat. But, what really caused the warriors to win—the underlying root cause—was their mental state.

Sitting Bull’s Sun Dance Vision

It started with Sitting Bull’s vision at the Sun Dance. Sitting Bull held a multi-day cultural ceremony at Deer Medicine Rocks along the Rosebud River which is one watershed east of the Little Bighorn. This was in mid-June, 1876, about 10 days before the Little Bighorn battle. After enduring enormous pain through self-mutilation and sensory deprivation, Sitting Bull publicly danced in the blazing sun until he dropped from exhaustion.

Sitting Bull had a vision where mounted U.S. soldiers fell upside down from the sky into their camp. He interpreted this as a message from Wakan Tanka, or the Great Spirit Creator, that American soldiers would attack them but be annihilated by the warriors in a victorious battle.

Sitting Bull correctly predicted the army’s loss and the warriors’ win. To the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne people, this was a divine message and a guarantee for victory. It psyched the warriors into a supercharged and unbeatable mental state.

The key to understanding this root cause is to appreciate the effect of Sitting Bull’s leadership and how Sitting Bull conducted himself in the Sun Dance held just days before the battle. It psychically and spiritually equipped the warriors to win. Sitting Bull’s credibility and integrity caused unity—cohesion with all native tribe occupants of the massive village including women, elders and other non-combatants.

Because their belief in winning was so strong—so overwhelmingly powerful—warriors went into battle with an unbreakable mental conviction. They knew they couldn’t lose. It was just a matter of exercising the process. That wasn’t the case with United States Army’s 7th Cavalry soldiers, and that’s why Custer really lost the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Authority to Write This Book

Why am I an authority to write this book? First, I’m not a historian. I’m a retired investigator with experience as a homicide cop, then as a forensic coroner, now as a crime writer and researcher. I’m also formally trained in conducting a Root Cause Analysis of crime and accident events by the industry’s authority, Think Reliability.

I’ve always had an interest in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. I also have an intense interest and some experience in Native American spirituality after being exposed to the sweat lodge culture. It’s part of my curiosity to try and make some sense out of interconnected consciousness… but that’s for another book.

I decided to write a post on my blog site www.DyingWords.net about applying a root cause analysis to the Little Bighorn battle. To my surprise—my astonishment, you could say—I found the root cause of why Custer lost wasn’t the numbers, the tactics, the terrain, the weapons or even George Custer’s inflated ego and erroneous decision about ignoring reconnaissance and splitting his forces. These were factors, for sure. But no matter how I analyzed it, the arrows kept pointing at the Sun Dance.

What started as a blog post turned into this book. It began with fact research that took me down a historical rabbit hole, through tightly-connected strategical and tactical tunnels, then into a labyrinth of fascinating insights about military procedure, native culture and overall human conditions. Most blog posts take a few hours to research and write. This book took two years and I want to share it with you.

While the root cause of why Custer really lost the Battle of the Little Bighorn appears obvious, it seems this simple explanation escaped most historians. They paid little attention to the Sun Dance’s important influence in every publication and film I’ve seen. It’s fair to say that no other work details the Sun Dance connection to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. If it exists, I haven’t found it. If it does, I hope you can share.

Doing a Root Cause Analysis

Conducting a root cause analysis isn’t difficult. It’s actually a common sense approach to looking at an outcome, or a negative-impact loss situation, and getting to the root reason for what caused it. In the crime business, it helps identify the motive and points out the suspect. In the accident business, it identifies a danger and seeks to prevent another mishap by eliminating the cause. Determining a root cause also identifies responsibility and accountability for negligent actions.

The same principles apply whether you’re cause mapping something as simple as a fall down the stairs, something fairly routine like a vehicle accident, something serious like a homicide, or something as highly-complex as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. You keep asking, “Why?” till you run out of answers. That’ll give you the root cause.

Root cause analysis is also called cause and effect analysis or fish-boning. You state your effect like “over 300 unnecessary deaths at the Little Bighorn” and ask why that happened. Your first cause answer will be “a battle between the Lakota Sioux/Northern Cheyenne alliance and the U.S. Cavalry”. Your next question might be “why did the Sioux and Cheyenne ally?” The answer is because “Sitting Bull pulled them together for mutual protection through the Sun Dance ritual”. Another question is “Why were the soldiers so outnumbered?” The obvious answer is because “the Sioux and Cheyenne made a pact sealed by the Sun Dance to ally for safety in numbers to prevent being attacked by soldiers”.

This alliance and the huge number of warriors coming together happened because Sitting Bull realized the dangers from a direct attack on his camp by U.S. soldiers. His spiritual leadership allied all available native people into one huge village. The alliance mechanism mentally bonded them.

Sitting Bull galvanized this through the traditional Sun Dance ceremony and demonstrating the four sacred Lakota principles of bravery, fortitude, generosity and wisdom. At the Sun Dance, Sitting Bull reaffirmed his mental strength, physical endurance and unwavering personal commitment to his peoples’ welfare. Again, this points to the Sun Dance ritual as the common denominator for bonding the people.

You need to take every pertinent and contributing factor you can find into account when doing a root cause analysis. In the case of the Little Bighorn, that includes every relevant contributor or detractor on both sides of the battlefield. For the soldiers, there were leadership problems, a lack of training and proficiency in horsemanship, poor shooting ability, fatigue, pain, hunger, thirst, bad morale and regiment infighting, poor or non-existent reconnaissance and intelligence as well as severe tactical mistakes, fear, terror, emotional collapse and disorder leading to chaos and a complete command breakdown. Additionally, the soldiers didn’t have personal skin in the game until it came to the end. Then, it was too late to escape.

Native American Warrior Superiority

The list of contributing factors is also extensive, but it comes around to Native American warrior superiority in almost every way. They had the terrain on their side or home field advantage. The warriors had extensive weaponry and the skills to use it. And they also had total skin in the game from the start. Their cultural and personal survival depended on winning. But, most of all, the warriors had the unswayable will to win and the incredible ability to communicate through some form of consciousness-based interconnection across five miles of rugged battlefield.

Conventional western science doesn’t begin to address or understand this phenomenon. Somehow, it’s part of the Lakota and Cheyenne cultural complexity. That’s firmly formed, anchored and nurtured in the Sun Dance ritual. This reality is foreign to most Euro-Americans, but many people in today’s Native American societies understand this power and still practice the principles.

Finally, you’ll get to the question about mental preparedness. There’s no other answer than the Sun Dance. Clearly, the root cause of why Custer really lost the Battle of the Little Bighorn is due to Sitting Bull’s leadership in mentally preparing his warriors to fight. Not only were they incredibly psyched-up, but these fighting men were desperately protecting their families and their way of life. Their willpower and their ability to cooperate on the battlefield completely overpowered the 7th Cavalry. The Native Americans turned the table on the army, immediately and completely throwing the cavalry’s offensive charge into a defensive rout.

Building a Cause Map

On a cause map produced in a spreadsheet, the effect and cause boxes connect with arrows. My actual cause map for the Battle of the Little Bighorn on the Think Reliability Excel sheet is far more detailed. It’s available at a link on my website where you can print it out, but it looks something like this concept.

Root cause analysis theory is straightforward. You keep drilling down till you run out of questions. In some cases, there can be multiple root causes. With the Little Bighorn battle, you can make the argument that Custer made a gross tactical error by dividing his command against a vastly superior force. He failed to anticipate the warrior numbers and resolve to fight. History proves that quite right. Ultimately, Custer failed to properly assess his battle challenges and options.

In fact, the mentality of the entire United States Army hierarchy for capturing “hostile” natives was to prevent the villages from breaking up and fleeing. That’s what they assumed would happen. It wasn’t just Custer who got the native people wrong.

Not one of them—from President Ulysses S. Grant to William Sherman, General of the Army, to General Philip Sheridan, Commander of the Missouri Department, to General Alfred Terry, leader of the fateful 1876 Dakota-Montana-Wyoming summer campaign—gave any thought that the native people would do anything but flee or cut & run. Custer, like all his superiors, went into the campaign with the entire concern that his challenge would be locating and containing the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne to prevent them from running.

The challenge with doing a proper and thorough root cause analysis with something as intertwined as the Battle of the Little Bighorn is getting reliable information. Determining the facts is crucial before putting them in an analytical order. Fortunately, there is a wealth of reliable knowledge available in books, films and internet sites. Sifting through what historically occurred leading up to, during and after the battle is time-consuming. Then there’s the task of researching the Sun Dance ceremony, and what psychological/physiological impact it really had.

Organizing This Book

To make sense of what happened at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the implications it still has on the Native American people, it’s necessary to look at this thing in bite-sized chunks. I’ve laid this book out accordingly. You can take any section and read it independently of other parts. Or, you can follow the book chronologically from section to section.

It’s not intended to produce a complete history lesson on Euro-American and Native American relations. Rather, this book is primarily about what caused the Little Bighorn battle, why Custer lost, and what happened afterward to result in the current Native American plight. It’s a case of not knowing where you are—and where you’re going—without knowing where you’ve been. Here’s how this book is organized:

This book is meant as a resource for students of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and to inform anyone interested in this historical milestone to clearly grasp the facts. It’s also meant to raise awareness of the rich and complex cultural contribution that Native Americans have to offer. As well, it’s to help understand the plight suffered by current Native Americans.

I try not to be a Custer apologist or to overly bash him. History has done its fair share of both. This is simply an attempt to get the truth—as best as possible.

But, what I don’t think history has properly done is taking a detailed and objective look at the root cause of why Custer really lost the Battle of the Little Bighorn. And I’m sure nothing was more influential on how the battle turned out than the Sun Dance. I’m also positive George Custer never considered it.

As much as Custer had over a decade of soldier experience—some of it on the plains—he had little or no appreciation of the Native American resolve to fight at the Little Bighorn. He also had no understanding of the Sun Dance culture and the mental effect it had on the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors. And Custer certainly had no idea how strong Sitting Bull’s spiritual guidance truly was.

George Custer severely underestimated his opponents. Custer was poorly prepared, psychologically unstable and culturally ignorant. He had no concept of Lakota spiritualism, how they thought, and the psychological power of Chief Sitting Bull’s Sun Dance ceremony.

_   _   _

If you’d like a Free Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) of Sun Dance – Why Custer Really Lost the Battle of the Little Bighorn, email me at garry.rodgers@shaw.ca and let me know if you’d like a Mobi, Epub, PDF, Webpage or Word.doc file.