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.