The panic which the failure of Jay Cooke precipitated in 1873 could scarcely have been deferred for many years. The waste of the Civil War period, and the enthusiasm for economic development which followed it, invited the retribution that usually follows continued and widespread inflation. Already the completion of a national railway system was foreshadowed. Heretofore the western demand had been for railways at any cost, but the Granger activities following the panic gave warning of an approaching period when this should be changed into a demand for regulation of railroads. But as yet the frontier remained substantially intact, and until its railway system should be completed the Granger demand could not be translated into an effective movement for federal control. It was not until 1879 that the United States recovered from the depression following the crisis. In that year resumption marked the readjustment of national currency, reconstruction was over, and the railways entered upon the last five years of the culminating period in the history of the frontier. When the five years were over, five new continental routes were available for transportation. The Texas and Pacific had hardly started its progress across Texas when checked by the panic in the vicinity of Fort Worth. When it revived, it pushed its track towards Sierra Blanca and El Paso, aided by a land grant from the state. Beyond Texas it never built. Corporations of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, all bearing the name of Southern Pacific, constructed the line across the Colorado River and along the Gila, through lands acquired by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853. Trains were running over its tracks to St. Louis by January, 1882, and to New Orleans by the following October. In the course of this Southern Pacific construction, connection had been made with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé at Deming, New Mexico, in March, 1881, but through lack of harmony between the roads their junction was of little consequence. [Illustration: THE PACIFIC RAILROADS, 1884 This map shows only the main lines of the continental railroads in 1884, and omits the branch lines and local roads which existed everywhere and were specially thick in the Mississippi and lower Missouri valleys.] The owners of the Southern Pacific opened an additional line through southern Texas in the beginning of 1883. Around the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio, of Texas, they had grouped other lines and begun double construction from San Antonio west, and from El Paso, or more accurately Sierra Blanca, east. Between El Paso and Sierra Blanca, a distance of about ninety miles, this new line and the Texas and Pacific used the same track. In later years the line through San Antonio and Houston became the main line of the Southern Pacific.