Native American peoples had, at bare minimum, about 20,000 years (and most likely significantly longer than that), to venture across every bit of the Americas. Obviously, some portions were less densely populated than others. The western Plains, for example, much more sparsely populated than they were in historic times. Before the re-introduction of the horse onto the Plains in the late 17th Century, the nomadic, bison-hunting lifestyle typically associated with Plains cultures like the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Comanche wasn't viable. Back in the 1400s, the nations of the Plains would be concentrated mostly in the eastern plains and prairies, living in sedentary farming villages. Bison hunting would be seasonal, either waiting for the herds to come close to their communities or by sending out hunting parties on foot to places where the bison would be known to congregate at certain times in the year.

But going back even further gives me an opportunity to discuss a particularly well travelled Native culture. From about 200 BCE to 400 CE, the Ohio (or Scioto) Hopewell were the cultural epicenter for what archaeologists call the "Hopewell Tradition" or "Hopewell Interaction Sphere." This was a collection of many different cultures that came to adopted similar artistic, ceremonial, and architectural motifs, throughout the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, as well as portions of the Great Lakes. On this map, you can see the major cultural blocs of the Hopewell Tradition.

The dark brown patch on the map represents the region associated with the Adena, the cultural from which the Ohio Hopewell emerged, after adopting the early aspects of the Hopewell Tradition from the Havana Hopewell to their west. The Adena and the Ohio Hopewell are the same people with evolving traditions. Not everyone "converted" over the the Hopewell ways of doing things immediately though, and even late into the "Hopewell" era, we know there were active Adena traditionalists living alongside them (especially in the east) and occasionally sharing the same ceremonial sites in Ohio.

Now, where the Ohio Hopewell become relevant to this discussion is that their trade / exchange / collection sphere of influence is absolutely enormous. They were pulling in silver from the subarctic in Ontario, copper from Lake Superior, mica and quartz from the southern Appalachians, shells and shark teeth from the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, iron meteorites from Kansas, chert from the Dakotas, and obsidian from Yellowstone and Idaho.

It's difficult to properly describe the means by which the Hopewell acquired all these items. The typically means by which archaeologists identity trade in the ancient world break down here - especially when it comes to the example of the obsidian. We don't see the trickling outward of obsidian from Yellowstone, with communities further west having more and larger pieces while those to the east are dealing with whatever the others could spare to pass along to them. We also don't see Hopewellian goods traveling westward out of Ohio in exchange for these items.

Instead, what we see are that some Ohio Hopewell sites are loaded with obsidian, while other Hopewellian communities have very little. Mound 11 at the Mound City site near Chillicothe, Ohio held thousands of obsidian artifacts weighing in at about 300 pounds, including gigantic obsidian points, like these. They clearly weren't working with someone else's hand-me-down obsidian.

There are two schools of thought concerning what was going on at the time, if it's not trade as we'd normally think of it. One is that that the major Ohio Hopewell ceremonial sites attracted pilgrims from far and wide, who brought these items from their homelands as gifts and ceremonial offerings. Alternatively, the Ohio Hopewell themselves were making these journeys themselves - traveling great distances and bringing back some trophy from their travels, perhaps as a rite of passage, perhaps simply because they lived in an age and a society were an individual could easily sate whatever wanderlust struck them. Perhaps its some mix of all these possibilities. In any case, these explanations revolve around individual people traveling hundreds, and some times thousands of miles, rather than 10s of miles to travel to trade with the community next door.

We also know that some Hopewell artists either saw exotic animals themselves or had travelers describe them. The Hopewell loved to depict animals in their art (check out their pipes for an impressive menagerie of creatures). This includes animals like grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, and possibly mountain goats, which could have been seen by whoever was making the trip from Yellowstone. A little more intrigue is this depiction of a jaguar that came from a Kansas City Hopewell site rather than an Ohio Hopewell site, and an Ohio Hopewell engraving (sketch of the original depiction) of an ocelot or jaguar. Now 2,000 years ago or so, both of these cats would have had a minor presence as far north as the mouth of the Mississippi, so it's most likely these artists were depicting animals they saw while traveling to the Gulf. However, this was also around the time that maize starts showing up in the area - though it'd still be centuries before it became a staple crop of the region. So it's possible that these animals during an expedition to acquire maize. If so, that'd probably have been the American Southwest and not Mesoamerica, though I've seen at least one archaeologist (Timothy Pauketat) make that suggestion.