It seems likely that hunky-dory could have originated in the Southern mountains and spread out from there — many phrases and usages did. The first recorded use (hunkey-dorey) is found in George Christy’s “Essence of Old Kentucky”, published in 1862. Christy purported to write in a Southern dialect and may well have picked up the phrase from someone from Kentucky, or by traveling to Kentucky himself. Hunky-dory and variants were slowly making it into print by 1866, but evidently Pollard was not familiar with it before his 1869 tour of the Virginia mountains. Pollard being a cosmopolitan city-dweller at this time, it seems more likely that the mountaineer had picked up the term locally since Pollard evidently did not know it.