The progress of construction of the road after 1866 was rapid enough. At the end of 1865, though the Central Pacific had started two years before the Union Pacific, it had completed only sixty miles of track, to the latter's forty. During 1866 the Central Pacific built thirty laborious miles over the mountains, and in 1867, forty-six miles, while in the same two years the Union Pacific built five hundred. In 1868, the western road, now past its worst troubles, added more than 360 to its mileage; the Union Pacific, unchecked by the continental divide, making a new record of 425. By May 10, 1869, the line was done, 1776 miles from Omaha to Sacramento. For the last sixteen months of the continental race the two roads together had built more than two and a half miles for every working day. Never before had construction been systematized so highly or the rewards for speed been so great. Whether regarded as an economic achievement or a national work, the building of the road deserved the attention it received; yet it was scarcely finished before the scandal-monger was at work. Beadle had written a chapter full of "floridly complimentary notices" of the men who had made possible the feat, but before he went to press their reputations were blasted, and he thought it safest "to mention no names." "Never praise a man," he declared in disgust, "or name your children after him, till he is dead." Before the end of Grant's first administration the _Crédit Mobilier_ scandal proved that men, high in the national government, had speculated in the project whose success depended on their votes. That many of them had been guilty of indiscretion, was perfectly clear, but they had done only what many of their greatest predecessors had done. Their real fault was made more prominent by their misfortune in being caught by an aroused national conscience which suddenly awoke to heed a call that it had ever disregarded in the past. The junction point for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific had been variously fixed by the acts of 1862 and 1864. In 1866 it was left open to fortune or enterprise, and had not Congress intervened in 1869 it might never have existed. In their rush for the land grants the two rivals hurried on their surveys to the vicinity of Great Salt Lake, where their advancing ends began to overlap, and continued parallel for scores of miles. Congress, noticing their indisposition to agree upon a junction, intervened in the spring of 1869, ordering the two to bring their race to an end at Promontory Point, a few miles northwest of Ogden on the shore of the lake. Here in May, 1869, the junction was celebrated in due form.