The fright among the people was proportionate to the work they had done and the value of what they were losing. Since the first well was sunk the wilderness had become a busy region, teeming with activity and endowed with wealth. In ten years the business had sprung up from nothing to a net product of 6,000,000 barrels of oil a year, using a capital of $200,000,000 and supporting a population of 60,000 people. The people were drilling one hundred new wells per month, at an average cost of $6000 each. They had devised the forms, and provided the financial institutions needed in a new business. They invented many new and ingenious mechanical contrivances. They had built up towns and cities, with schools, churches, lyceums, theatres, libraries, boards of trade. There were nine daily and eighteen weekly newspapers published in the region and supported by it. All this had been created in ten years, at a cost of untold millions in experiments and failures, and the more precious cost of sacrifice, suffering, toil, and life. The ripe fruit of all this wonderful development the men of the oil country saw being snatched away from them.[47] More than once during these lean years, as more than once later, the public alarm went to the verge of violent outbreak. This ruinous prosperity brought stolid Pennsylvania within sight of civil war in 1872, which was the principal subject before the Pennsylvania Legislature of that year, and forced Congress to make an official investigation. The New York Legislature followed Congress and the Pennsylvania Legislature with an investigation in 1873. "There was great popular excitement.... It raged like a violent fever," was the description it heard of the state of things in Pennsylvania.[48] There were panics in oil speculation, bank failures, defalcations. Many committed suicide. Hundreds were driven into bankruptcy and insane asylums.