Sycamore Shoals in Elizabethton, along the Watauga River, is a nationally recognized historic landscape central to the settlement of the trans-Appalachian frontier. Used by Native Americans for thousands of years and later by Cherokee hunting parties, it became a gathering place for traders, long hunters, and settlers in the 1760s and 1770s. Here the Watauga settlers organized one of the first written constitutional governments west of the Appalachians, and in 1775 Cherokee leaders and Richard Henderson signed the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals. The site also saw the 1776 attack on Fort Watauga and the 1780 mustering of the Overmountain Men before Kings Mountain.