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.
A third connection of the Southern Pacific across Texas was operated before the end of 1883 over its Mojave extension in California and the Atlantic and Pacific from the Needles to Albuquerque. The old Atlantic and Pacific had built to Vinita, gone into receivership, and come out as St. Louis and San Francisco. But its land grant had remained unused, while the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé had reached Albuquerque and had exhausted its own land grant, received through the state of Kansas and ceasing at the Colorado line. Entering Colorado, the latter had passed by Las Animas and thrown a branch along the old Santa Fé trail to Santa Fé and Albuquerque. Here it came to an agreement with the St. Louis and San Francisco, by which the two roads were to build jointly under the Atlantic and Pacific franchise, from Albuquerque into California. They built rapidly; but the Southern Pacific, not relishing a rival in its state, had made use of its charter privilege to meet the new road on the eastern boundary of California. Hence its Mojave branch was waiting at the Needles when the Atlantic and Pacific arrived there; and the latter built no farther. Upon the completion of bridges over the Colorado and Rio Grande this third eastern connection of the Southern Pacific was completed so that Pullman cars were running through into St. Louis on October 21, 1883.
The names of Billings and Villard are most closely connected with the renascence of the Northern Pacific. The panic had stopped this line at the Missouri River, although it had built a few miles in Washington territory, around its new terminal city of Tacoma. The illumination of crisis times had served to discredit the route as effectively as Jay Cooke had served to boom it with advertisements in his palmy days. The existence of various land grant railways in Washington and Oregon made the revival difficult to finance since its various rivals could offer competition by both water and rail along the Columbia River, below Walla Walla. Under the presidency of Frederick Billings construction revived about 1879, from Mandan, opposite Bismarck on the Missouri, and from Wallula, at the junction of the Columbia and Snake. From these points lines were pushed over the Pend d'Oreille and Missouri divisions towards the continental divide. Below Wallula, the Columbia Valley traffic was shared by agreement with the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, which, under the presidency of Henry Villard, owned the steamship and railway lines of Oregon. As the time for opening the through lines approached, the question of Columbia River competition increased in serious aspect. Villard solved the problem through the agency of his famous blind pool, which still stands remarkable in railway finance. With the proceeds of the pool he organized the Oregon and Transcontinental as a holding company, and purchased a controlling interest in the rival roads. With harmony of plan thus insured, he assumed the presidency of the Northern Pacific in 1881, in time to complete and celebrate the opening of its main line in 1883. His celebration was elaborate, yet the Nation remarked that the "mere achievement of laying a continuous rail across the continent has long since been taken out of the realm of marvels, and the country can never feel again the thrill which the joining of the Central and Union Pacific lines gave it."
The land grant railways completed these four eastern connections across the frontier in the period of culmination. Private capital added a fifth in the new route through Denver and Ogden, controlled by the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy and the Denver and Rio Grande. The Burlington, built along the old Republican River trail to Denver, had competed with the Union Pacific for the traffic of that point since June, 1882. West of Denver the narrow gauge of the Denver and Rio Grande had been advancing since 1870.
General William J. Palmer and a group of Philadelphia capitalists had, in 1870, secured a Colorado charter for their Denver and Rio Grande. Started in 1871, it had reached the new settlement at Colorado Springs that autumn, and had continued south in later years. Like other roads it had progressed slowly in the panic years. In 1876 it had been met at Pueblo by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé. From Pueblo it contested successfully with this rival for the grand cañon of the Arkansas, and built up that valley through the Gunnison country and across the old Ute reserve, to Grand Junction. From the Utah line it had been continued to Ogden by an allied corporation. A through service to Ogden, inaugurated in the summer of 1883, brought competition to the Union Pacific throughout its whole extent.
The continental frontier, whose isolation the Union Pacific had threatened in 1869, was easily accessible by 1884. Along six different lines between New Orleans and St. Paul it had been made possible to cross the sometime American desert to the Pacific states. No longer could any portion of the republic be considered as beyond the reach of civilization. Instead of a waste that forbade national unity in its presence, a thousand plains stations beckoned for colonists, and through lines of railway iron bound the nation into an economic and political unit. "As the railroads overtook the successive lines of isolated frontier posts, and settlements spread out over country no longer requiring military protection," wrote General P. H. Sheridan in 1882, "the army vacated its temporary shelters and marched on into remote regions beyond, there to repeat and continue its pioneer work. In rear of the advancing line of troops the primitive 'dug-outs' and cabins of the frontiersmen, were steadily replaced by the tasteful houses, thrifty farms, neat villages, and busy towns of a people who knew how best to employ the vast resources of the great West. The civilization from the Atlantic is now reaching out toward that rapidly approaching it from the direction of the Pacific, the long intervening strip of territory, extending from the British possessions to Old Mexico, yearly growing narrower; finally the dividing lines will entirely disappear and the mingling settlements absorb the remnants of the once powerful Indian nations who, fifteen years ago, vainly attempted to forbid the destined progress of the age." The deluge of population realized by Sheridan, and let in by the railways, had, by 1890, blotted the uninhabited frontier off the map. Local spots yet remained unpeopled, but the census of 1890 revealed no clear division between the unsettled West and the rest of the United States.
New states in plains and mountains marked the abolition of the last frontier as they had the earlier. In less than ten years the gap between Minnesota and Oregon was filled in: North Dakota and South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Washington. In 1890, for the first time, a solid band of states connected the Atlantic and Pacific. Farther south, the Indian Country succumbed to the new pressure. The Dawes bill released a fertile acreage to be distributed to the land hungry who had banked up around the borders of Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas. Oklahoma, as a territory, appeared in 1890, while in eighteen more years, swallowing up the whole Indian Country, it had taken its place as a member of the Union. Between the northern tier of states and Oklahoma, the middle West had grown as well. Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, the last creating eleven new counties in its eastern third in 1889, had seen their population densify under the stimulus of easy transportation. Much of the settlement had been premature, inviting failure, as populism later showed, but it left no area in the United States unreclaimed, inaccessible, and large enough to be regarded as a national frontier. The last frontier, the same that Long had described as the American Desert in 1820, had been won.