Among the Puritans who settled in New Hampshire about the year 1636, during the great emigration which preceded the Long Parliament, was one bearing the name of Thomas Webster.  He was said to be of Scotch extraction, but was, if this be true, undoubtedly of the Lowland or Saxon Scotch as distinguished from the Gaels of the Highlands.  He was, at all events, a Puritan of English race, and his name indicates that his progenitors were sturdy mechanics or handicraftsmen.  This Thomas Webster had numerous descendants, who scattered through New Hampshire to earn a precarious living, found settlements, and fight Indians.  In Kingston, in the year 1739, was born one of this family named Ebenezer Webster.  The struggle for existence was so hard for this particular scion of the Webster stock, that he was obliged in boyhood to battle for a living and pick up learning as he best might by the sole aid of a naturally vigorous mind.  He came of age during the great French war, and about 1760 enlisted in the then famous corps known as “Rogers’s Rangers.”  In the dangers and the successes of desperate frontier fighting, the “Rangers” had no equal; and of their hard and perilous experience in the wilderness, in conflict with Indians and Frenchmen, Ebenezer Webster, strong in body and daring in temperament, had his full share.

When the war closed, the young soldier and Indian fighter had time to look about him for a home.  As might have been expected, he clung to the frontier to which he was accustomed, and in the year 1763 settled in the northernmost part of the town of Salisbury.  Here he built a log-house, to which, in the following year, he brought his first wife, and here he began his career as a farmer.  At that time there was nothing civilized between him and the French settlements of Canada.  The wilderness stretched away from his door an ocean of forest unbroken by any white man’s habitation; and in these primeval woods, although the war was ended and the French power overthrown, there still lurked roving bands of savages, suggesting the constant possibilities of a midnight foray or a noonday ambush, with their accompaniments of murder and pillage.  It was a fit home, however, for such a man as Ebenezer Webster.  He was a borderer in the fullest sense in a commonwealth of borderers.  He was, too, a splendid specimen of the New England race; a true descendant of ancestors who had been for generations yeomen and pioneers.  Tall, large, dark of hair and eyes, in the rough world in which he found himself he had been thrown at once upon his own resources without a day’s schooling, and compelled to depend on his own innate force of sense and character for success.  He had had a full experience of desperate fighting with Frenchmen and Indians, and, the war over, he had returned to his native town with his hard-won rank of captain.  Then he had married, and had established his home upon the frontier, where he remained battling against the grim desolation of the wilderness and of the winter, and against all the obstacles of soil and climate, with the same hardy bravery with which he had faced the Indians.  After ten years of this life, in 1774, his wife died and within a twelvemonth he married again.