 Around the same time, John Honeycut was operating out of a hut at the mouth of Roan Creek (about 20 miles upstream from the Shoals, now part of Watauga Lake).Early hunters and explorers called the flats around Sycamore Shoals the Watauga "Old Fields," as they were full of cane rather than trees, resembling once-cultivated fields that had for years lain fallow.In the Spring of 1770, James Robertson, possibly fleeing the turmoil created by the Regulator Movement in his home state of North Carolina, made an excursion into the Watauga Valley.