Back in 1862, the march of progress demanded better facilities for transportation across the plains, mountain ridges, and forests of the vast land beyond the Mississippi River than were afforded by the prairie-schooner caravans. In order that the great gaps of distance should be bridged in shorter time and by easier, safer means, the government authorized the construction of a Pacific railroad, a logical move, since the railroads were stretching their network of ties and tracks and switches in many directions. This Pacific railroad, built by 1869, at a terrific cost in money and with a prodigious amount of trickery, reached from Omaha, Nebraska, to Ogden, Utah, a distance of 1,029 miles, where the Central Pacific terminated its stretch of 878 miles from San Francisco. Thus it was made possible to come by train from San Francisco to New York, a distance of 3,322 miles. By the time ten years had elapsed after its inception, its directing and promoting agents were before the great court of public opinion, branded for crimes, with marks more loathsome than that of Cain, as a result of the disclosures brought forth in the investigations conducted in the two Houses of Congress. In consequence, the Crédit Mobilier held the centre of the stage; nothing else was discussed; argument and debate were at white heat; and every man who feared implication lived upon the rack in a torture of suspense. Two members of the House, Oakes Ames, of Massachusetts, and James Brooks, were slated for expulsion, while the same sentence threatened Senator James W. Patterson. But Congress became too demoralized and too apprehensive as to where the accusing finger would tag another victim to take any more decisive action than censure. Ames and Brooks, weary, ill, and shaken by the efforts to make of them the scapegoats, died in the opening days of the new administration, within two months of the investigation. James Brooks, who had been a trusted government director of the Union Pacific, died April 30, 1873; while the bluff, free-handed manufacturer, Ames, followed him a few days later, on May 8, 1873. Ben Perley Poore explains the Crédit Mobilier in part as follows: