When most people drive home to be with family on Christmas Eve, an Independence truck driver will fire up his rig and head north to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

This will be Richard Boyden’s seventh annual Christmas trip to take food, toys and other supplies to the Oglala Lakota tribe.

“I really need wood-burning stoves this year,” Boyden said Friday. “There are 400 families up there without any propane. So I need stoves — and frozen turkeys.”

Boyden also said he needed toys — wrapped and tagged by age and gender. He asks that food items be boxed. People on the reservation also need chain saws.

Wilda Black Bear, who lives on the reservation, said Boyden’s trips help families who are barely surviving. She lives in a three-bedroom house with 16 other family members.

“So many people around are a lot worse off than we are,” she said in a telephone interview Friday.

Boyden’s cause began several years ago while he was driving from Seattle to Kansas City. He passed through the reservation and was struck by the squalor, poverty and unemployment. He said families there earn on average about $260 a month.

The Christmas trip is one of four that Boyden, who calls himself a full-blooded European-American, makes each year to the reservation. He estimates he’s hauled more than 100 tons of goods there.

Boyden said he also hoped to raise enough money this year to pay for a truck that he would use specifically for his Pine Ridge trips.