FLINT, TIMOTHY (1780-1840), American clergyman and writer, was born of Puritan stock in Reading, Mass., July 23, 1780. He graduated at Harvard in 1800, and after a rather troubled career as Congregational minister in Lunenberg (Mass.), he became a home missionary. He was also for a short period a teacher and a farmer. His observations on the life and manners of the frontier were recorded in a picturesque work, Recollections of the Last Ten Years Passed in the Valley of the Mississippi (1826; reprinted in England and translated into French), one of the most valuable accounts of the West at this period. The success of this volume and the failing health of the writer led him to relinquish his more active labours for literary pursuits, and, besides editing the Western Monthly Review in Cincinnati (1827-3o) and The Knickerbocker in New York (1833), he published a number of books, including Francis Berrian, or the Mexican Patriot (1826), his best novel; A Condensed Geography and History of the Western States (18 28) ; George Mason, the Young Backwoodsman (1829) ; a Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone (1833); and Indian Wars in the West (1833). He also edited the Personal Narrative (1831) of J. O. Pattie, an adven turer in Mexico and the Far West. Flint died in Reading (Mass.), Aug. 16, 1840, and was buried at Salem.
See the biography Timothy Flint (191I) by J. E. Kirkpatrick, which contains a bibliography.