More than four decades before the USA and Spain engaged in the open warfare that resulted in the end of direct Spanish imperialism in the western hemisphere, a minor diplomatic incident nearly plunged the two countries into early war. On February 28, 1854, the cargo steamship the Black Warrior entered the port of Havana as it had dozens of times previously, but on this occasion, the ship was seized by the Spanish colonial authorities. Under the leadership of Captain Bullock, the ship, with its cargo of goods and transit passengers, was detained, accused of failing to pay taxes on the commercial goods. A dispute over a mere technicality about the ship’s right to modify its customs declarations escalated into a full-blown international incident that immediately drew national and international attention, and even US President Pierce and the House of Representatives issued an official public inquiry into the matter.1 After several weeks of tense exchange and negotiations, the ship and its cargo were released with a fine of approximately $6000. The matter had, it seemed, been put to rest; however, the fallout of the affair simmered and intensified, threatening to trigger a war and exposing some of the most important issues affecting the nation.

The US West has long evoked fantasies of climatological stability: the aridity of the Southwest; the soggy Pacific Northwest’s endless rain; the “humid fallacy” that Mike Davis has argued inaccurately overlaid a Mediterranean climate onto Southern California. Davis' derivation from a uniformitarian geological model is less apposite for the earthquake-prone landscape of Southern California than the dramatic alternations of a catastrophist sensibility. Davis thus points not simply toward a more accurate description of the material conditions of the US West, but to the narrative rhythm of its climate, which unfolds across long stretches whose consistency challenges narrative interest until punctuated by the sudden violence of a shift in weather. Alongside two other central figurations of the US West – the Garden of the World and the Great American Desert – this chapter tracks this rhythm through western American literary history.