Hops of Port Blakely: The Cast-Off Clothes Protégé Who Saved a Captain
A Post-Intelligencer reporter hears from John Corbett how an Indigenous man named Williams earned a lifetime of beer, boarding-house meals, and the run of the Port Blakely mill.
It is not generally known that John Corbett, commonly called 'Perpetual Motion Corbett,' was for over ten years the right-hand man of Capt. William Renton, the Port Blakely millionaire, who died a few years ago. Through this fact the public is now able to learn something about the life of 'Hops,' or Williams, as he was sometimes called. 'Hops' died about a month ago, according to the report Corbett got from 'Cultus' Jim, and was for years a character in every sense of the word.
'I wouldn't know anything about the whys and wherefores,' said Corbett yesterday afternoon, when found by a Post-Intelligencer reporter, 'about "Hops" being a privileged character at Blakely, only for what Capt. Renton told me. You see "Hops" was a regular Indian, flat-headed, bow-legged, short and squatty. Well, sir, it would have made you die laughing to see the old fellow walking around togged out in Capt. Renton's cast-off clothes. Everybody who remembers the captain will call to mind that he was a large man and portly. Well, when old "Hops" got on one of his coats and vests he was a sight. He always turned up the trousers, but the vest—well, he could have put a bag of oats under the vest and you would not have noticed it. "Hops" could eat at the boarding house when he wanted to and go on board any of the company's ships without getting permission. Then he was allowed three glasses of beer each day. That was how he got the name of "Hops."
'It is quite a story of how he came to be the protégé of the captain and dates way back to the time the mill was at Port Orchard. In those days the Indians were sometimes pretty hostile and would kill a man. Old "Hops" got wind one day of a plan of the Indians—I think his tribe, but I am not sure—to wipe out the whites at Port Orchard. In the meantime Capt. Renton had crossed the Sound to Seattle after his mail and on his return was to have been killed. "Hops" wanted to save the captain and Mrs. Renton, so he took the old lady and hid her in his boat, covering her up with salmon. Then he started across the Sound and met the captain as he was returning home. The captain accompanied the old Indian to the latter's shanty and in some way "Hops" fixed the matter up with the Indian chief so that the captain was not troubled. The captain told me the story himself and thus explained why "Hops" did as he pleased.'
“'Hops' wanted to save the captain and Mrs. Renton, so he took the old lady and hid her in his boat, covering her up with salmon.”
The anecdote is told through the voice of a white mill hand, and it turns an Indigenous man into a loyal mascot—yet it also preserves a trace of a person named Williams whose life crossed the Puget Sound frontier. Port Blakely's mill is gone, but the paternalism and erasure in the story still shape how the region remembers its Native past.
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