Land Where My Fathers Died is the story of a young man's search for identity, love and his place in the world. While incarcerated six years for a murder he never committed, Jo Shelby Ferguson lost his only family in a highway accident. Upon his release from the Mississippi state penal farm, a trunk, the only earthly possession left to him, yields several bundles of old letters. Upon reading the first letter, he discovers they are written by his great-great-great grandmother. The story unfolds in the chronologically- arranged missives of their family's plight to Mexico with General J. O. Shelby of Missouri following the collapse of the Confederacy, of their trials and tribulations and ultimate destruction by the Juaristas. With only forty dollars in his pocket, an old Navy Colt pistol and the name Hacienda Michopa in his grandmother's abrupt last letter, Jo Shelby strikes out for Mexico, hitchhiking by various conveyances as he follows the same route of his namesake in search of the only family he hopes against hope still remains.