River in 1756, the first British settlement in what is now Tennessee and the westernmost British outpost to that date. Hostilities erupted between the British and the Cherokees into an armed conflict, and a siege of the fort ended with its surrender in 1760. After the French and Indian War, Britain issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbade settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains in an effort to mitigate conflicts with the Natives. But migration across the mountains continued, and the first permanent European settlers began arriving in northeastern Tennessee in the late 1760s. Most of them were English, but nearly 20% were Scotch-Irish. They formed the Watauga Association in 1772, a semi-autonomous representative government, and three years later reorganized themselves into the Washington District to support the cause of the American Revolutionary War. The next year, after an unsuccessful petition to Virginia, North Carolina agreed to annex the Washington District to provide protection from Native American attacks. In 1775, Richard Henderson negotiated a series of treaties with the Cherokee to sell the lands of the Watauga settlements at Sycamore Shoals on the banks of the Watauga River. An agreement to sell land for the Transylvania Colony, which included the territory in Tennessee north of the Cumberland River, was also signed. Later that year, Daniel Boone, under Henderson's employment, blazed a trail from Fort Chiswell in Virginia through the Cumberland Gap, which became part of the Wilderness Road, a major thoroughfare into Tennessee and Kentucky. The Chickamauga, a Cherokee faction loyal to the British led by Dragging Canoe, opposed the settling of the Washington District and Transylvania Colony, and in 1776 attacked Fort Watauga at Sycamore Shoals. The warnings of Dragging Canoe's cousin Nancy Ward spared many settlers' lives from the initial attacks. In 1779, James Robertson and John Donelson led two groups of settlers from the Washington District to the French Lick. These settlers constructed Fort Nashborough, which they named for Francis Nash, a brigadier general of the Continental Army. The next year, the settlers signed the Cumberland Compact, which established a representative government for the colony called the Cumberland Association. This settlement later grew into the city of Nashville. That same year John Sevier led a group of Overmountain Men from Fort Watauga to the Battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina, where they defeated the British. Three counties of the Washington District broke off from North