Why Two-Bit Peckerwood?

At some point in several of director Sam Peckinpah's films - Deadly Companions, Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, and others - one of the characters refers to another character or group of characters as a "Two-bit peckerwood," or "Two-bit redneck peckerwoods." It's a minor motif, I guess you could say. Since Peckinpah was known to do a lot of work on the scripts to his films, I have no doubt that this reference to the "two-bit peckerwood" comes straight from him.

I'm not exactly sure what he was trying to say with this phrase, probably just something someone he knew growing up used to say would be my guess, but the reason why he thought it was important and/or interesting enough to use so often is a mystery. The character who uses this phrase to describe someone else in these movie is always one of the protagonists - or what passes for a protagonist in one of Peckinpah's films - and they use it in reference to the sleaziest, scummiest, lowest of their enemies in the heat of battle.

Now, the fact that Peckinpah's heroes were often pretty low-down themselves means that when someone is low enough to be considered a "two-bit peckerwood" in one of his films, well, then they must be the lowest of the low, the absolute bottom of the barrel - someone so damn low that even the heartless, violent scumbags that Peckinpah considered the heroes of his movies would look down on them. Hill trash, scavengers, dry-gultchers, inbred scum i.e., Two-Bit Peckerwoods.