08/01/2026
🏔️ THE STORY BEHIND OUR WALLS 🏔️
Before there was a menu, before there was a porch full of hanging flowers, before there was even a town — there was a log cabin, raised by hand at the edge of the frontier.
Thomas Erskine Dawson was born in 1859 at Fort Benton, the son of a Scottish fur trader. As a boy he was sent across the ocean to be schooled in Scotland, and by the time he found his way home to Montana, he'd already been a shipyard mechanic, a sailor, and a scout riding for the North West Mounted Police through the Riel Rebellion. It was a big life for a young man — but the pull of home was bigger. He came back to work at the Blackfeet Indian Agency, and there he met Isabel Clarke, daughter of early Montana pioneer Malcolm Clarke.
They married in 1891. Two years later, in 1893, they staked a claim on the wild land just south of the brand-new Great Northern Railway line — among the very first to settle what would become the town of Midvale, now known as East Glacier Park. There was no town yet. No depot but a boxcar. Just timber, open range, and the mountains.
With their own hands, Tom and Isabel built a log cabin on that land.
Everything that followed grew outward from that one small building. Tom became a legendary guide through these mountains, leading the likes of Louis Hill Sr. and Gifford Pinchot into the backcountry, and discovering the pass that still carries his name — Dawson Pass. The town rose up around the family. Their daughter Helene married into the Edkins family, who came to run the Texaco Garage, the Wigwam Cafe, and the Glacier Park Trading Company. The frontier, slowly, became a community.
And the cabin itself kept moving forward too. In time, it passed to a man named Dan Boyington, who added a row of small cabins out back and opened it as the Log Cabin Inn — Midvale's very first restaurant and boarding house. Through the 1920s, folks called it the "Frozen Dog," for how cold those sleeping rooms got on a winter night, and it was here that the railroad crews and loggers building this young town came in from the cold for a hot meal and a bed. In 1927, Roy and Mildred Nelson took over and kept its doors open through the Depression years. Owners came and went across the decades that followed, each adding their own chapter, until new owners took it on in 1990 and opened its doors once more — this time as Serrano's.
More than 130 years have passed since Tom and Isabel Dawson notched those first logs into place. Empires of a different kind have come and gone in this valley — homesteads, railroads, cafes, garages, inns — but this building has never once stopped doing the thing it was built to do: welcoming travelers in from the mountains, and feeding them well.
Next time you're on our porch, run your hand along those old log walls. You're touching the frontier. 🌶️
