In 1868 a black basalt slab was seen at Dhiban, east of the Dead Sea, carrying a long inscription in Moabite. A paper squeeze of the text was taken before the stone was broken up in a local dispute, and the pieces and the squeeze together preserved it. It is the monument of Mesha, king of Moab, describing how he threw off the rule of Israel, and it is the longest royal inscription of the region from that period.
One line concerns Gad directly. Mesha states that the men of Gad had dwelt in the land of Ataroth from of old, and that he took the town and killed its people. That single clause is the earliest mention of the tribe outside the Bible, and it establishes Gad as a real population group holding real ground on the Moabite frontier rather than only a name in a genealogy.
It also explains the tribe's fate. Gad held the tableland of Gilead, the exposed shoulder of Israel, with Moab pressing from the south and Aram and later Assyria from the north and east. Blessings preserved in the Hebrew Bible describe the tribe in exactly those terms, as raided and raiding back. It was among the first territories stripped away in the Assyrian campaigns of the eighth century BCE, and afterwards the name recurs in lists and genealogies rather than in events.
A note on a homonym: the word gad also names fortune, and the Hebrew Bible elsewhere rebukes those who set a table for a deity called Gad. That is a different subject sharing a spelling, not this tribe.