The origin of “bunkum” — N.C. Congressman Felix Walker’s explanation of his longwinded, irrelevant speech on the Missouri Compromise as “talking for Buncombe” — approaches common knowledge, but the late columnist William Safire traced some notable details in “Safire’s Political Dictionary”:
“By 1828…talking to (or for) Buncombe was well known. The Wilmington (N.C.) Commercial referred in 1849 to ‘the Buncombe politicians — those who go for re-election merely,’ and British author Thomas Carlyle showed that the expression traveled the Atlantic with its meaning intact: ‘A parliament speaking through reporters to Buncombe and the 27 millions, mostly fools’…
“In 1923 William E. Woodward wrote a book titled Bunk and introduced the verb ‘debunk.’ A school of historians were named debunkers for the way they tore down the myths other historians had built up. Hokum, according to the OED, is a blend of hocus-pocus and bunkum.”
The original “buncombe” has been transcribed onto Wikipedia. Here, so wiki says, is the speech that Mr. Honorable Walker attempted to deliver on the floor of Congress only to be shouted down:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Missouri_Question:_Speech_of_Mr._Walker,_of_N.C.
And, although Felix Walker did live in Lincoln County for a time, I am not kin to him.