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Along with The Desert's Toll, filmed simultaneously at The Big Horn ranch in Montana, this silent Western was producer Hal Roach's lone attempt to create his own Western star. Kenneth McDonald, handsome and athletic, starred as Creighton Steele, an Eastern college graduate who inherits a Western ranch. En route, he meets a damsel-in-distress, Mary Calvert (Edna Murphy), who is searching for her long-lost brother (Joe Bennett). The wayward young man, as it turns out, is in the employ of a crooked gambler, Brady (William A. Steele), the very same villain who has been attempting to take over Creighton's ranch. Roach, who released this film through MGM, did not really know how to produce Westerns, and McDonald proved a failure as a cowboy star. His good looks quickly fading, the actor instead settled on a long, and lucrative, career as a villain, often in B-Westerns. Roach perennial Anita Garvin turned up in The Valley of Hell as Carmen, a dance-hall hostess, and future director George Stevens cranked the camera.