In "the epitome of movie 'cliff-hangers', and the last feature film made by Nell Shipman" (Trusky), she portrays Faith Diggs, a Seattle laundress and artist's model who digs the wild life in the Far North. Outraged that her financial backer-husband "won't play fair and square...because I'm a woman," she sets out to make her own fortune in the Klondike, in league with Dawson Kate, a hard-boiled Mae West prototype. In a most memorable scene, Faith, having fainted, awakens in Lost Valley, an arctic Eden populated by solicitous animals (actual location: Idaho's beautiful Priest Lake region). William K. Everson compares The Grub-Stake to Clarence Brown's Trail of '98, and calls Shipman "a kind of Far North equivalent of Leni Reifenstahl."