Before long, even the complicated gadgets devised by the miners could not extract enough gold to make the enterprise profitable. By the middle of the 1850s, only invasive techniques like pressurized water blasting and tunneling would yield gold, and such operations allowed a miner little more than wages working for a big employer. Peter Blodgett relates the travails of John Kincade, one such miner who had been left with little choice but to work for a large mining enterprise. In a letter to his brother dated August 8, 1854, Kincade complained:

All I have managed to make is a comfortable living. And that is as much as the mining population can average if not a little more. Mining is now reduced to a system. What commonly termed placer diggings being principally exhausted. The miners are seeking in the bowels of the mountains for primitive leads. . . . If he...