Timothy Murphy was an American soldier who fought during the Revolutionary War. In the Saratoga campaign, Murphy is reputed to have shot and killed British Army officers Sir Francis Clerke and Simon Fraser. Murphy's life is the subject of a 1953 novel titled The Rifleman.

The Saratoga campaign in 1777 was an attempt by the British high command for North America to gain military control of the strategically important Hudson River valley during the American Revolutionary War. It ended in the surrender of the British army, which historian Edmund Morgan argues, "was a great turning point of the war, because it won for Americans the foreign assistance which was the last element needed for victory."