Carl Sandburg

California City Landscape

On a mountain-side the real estate agents

Real estate signs

California's 1920s land boom—developers carved mountain subdivisions before infrastructure existed. Sandburg arrived in 1920s Hollywood and saw this speculation firsthand.

Put up signs marking the city lots to be sold there.
A man whose father and mother were Irish
Ran a goat farm half-way down the mountain;
He drove a covered wagon years ago,
Understood how to handle a rifle,
Shot grouse, buffalo, Indians, in a single year,

Shot grouse, buffalo, Indians

Sandburg lists humans alongside game animals—a brutal catalog showing how frontier violence treated Indigenous people as targets. The casual grammar is the point.

And now was raising goats around a shanty.
Down at the foot of the mountain
Two Japanese families had flower farms.
A man and woman were in rows of sweet peas
Picking the pink and white flowers
To put in baskets and take to the Los Angeles market.

Clean as what they handled

The Japanese farmers are aestheticized like their flowers—Sandburg's compliment carries the era's racial exoticism. 'Baby-faces' continues this problematic gaze.

They were clean as what they handled
There in the morning sun, the big people and the baby-faces.
Across the road, high on another mountain,
Stood a house saying, "I am it," a commanding house.
There was the home of a motion picture director
Famous for lavish whore-house interiors,

Lavish whore-house interiors

1920s Hollywood spectacle—directors like Cecil B. DeMille made Biblical epics and melodramas featuring elaborate sets of vice. The house's grandeur comes from selling fantasies of sin.

Clothes ransacked from the latest designs for women
In the combats of "male against female."
The mountain, the scenery, the layout of the landscape,
And the peace of the morning sun as it happened,
The miles of houses pocketed in the valley beyond—
It was all worth looking at, worth wondering about,

How young it might be

Not 'how long it will last' but 'how young it might be'—Sandburg sees Los Angeles as possibly just beginning, or possibly already aging. The syntax leaves both readings open.

How long it might last, how young it might be.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Three Californias Stacked Vertically

Sandburg arranges the poem as a literal landscape: real estate speculation at the mountain top, the Irish goat farmer halfway down, Japanese flower farmers at the bottom, and across the valley, the movie director's mansion on another peak. This isn't metaphor—it's reportage of 1920s Los Angeles geography, where development leapfrogged over existing settlements.

The Irish farmer embodies California's first boom (covered wagons, frontier violence) now reduced to subsistence. His biography—'Shot grouse, buffalo, Indians, in a single year'—compresses westward expansion's violence into one grammatically parallel list, treating Indigenous people as game. Sandburg doesn't editorialize; the horror is in the syntax.

The Japanese families represent California's agricultural present (1920s), growing flowers for urban markets while facing increasing hostility—California's Alien Land Laws (1913, 1920) were designed to prevent Japanese farmers from owning land. Sandburg's description ('clean as what they handled,' 'baby-faces') reveals his own era's racial lens even as he seems to admire them.

The movie director's house—'saying, I am it'—represents California's future: an economy built on selling fantasies. The detail about 'lavish whore-house interiors' and 'combats of male against female' points to directors like Cecil B. DeMille, whose Biblical epics and melodramas featured elaborate sets depicting vice and gender warfare. The mansion's grandeur comes from commodifying desire.

The Poem's Final Uncertainty

After cataloging these layers, Sandburg ends with radical uncertainty: 'How long it might last, how young it might be.' Not 'how long will it last' but 'how long it might last'—he's unsure if what he's seeing is durable or ephemeral.

The final phrase is stranger: 'how young it might be.' Los Angeles in the 1920s was simultaneously brand-new (the movie industry was barely 15 years old) and already showing signs of age (the Irish farmer's obsolescence, the real estate speculation already moving on). Sandburg seems genuinely uncertain whether he's witnessing a civilization's infancy or its premature aging.

'Worth wondering about' is the poem's only evaluation—not 'beautiful' or 'terrible,' just worth wondering. For a poet known for celebrating American vitality ('Chicago'), this restraint is notable. Sandburg sees California's layers—violence, labor, speculation, fantasy—and withholds judgment, offering only the landscape and the question of its future.