Hooker was a young officer in Seminole country at the time - I hardly think that his last name would have become so synonymous with prostitutes by the time that he was thirty that the word would be used in a local North Carolina newspaper matter-of-factly and without explanation as if it were a well-known term.
Hooker was an anonymous nobody in 1845.
Geesh, you guys can’t recognize a “wink” when you see 1!
But still, it’s a legitimate question - you’re only talking 15 years, and you’ve never heard “nobodies” (including teenagers) associated with certain things just in their locales?
;-)