Here's a link to an article in the Missoulian that discusses ownership, and a request from the Rothschild investment bank for a lease on the coal property.

[www.missoulian.com]

From the story:

The tracts cover roughly 20,000 acres broken into a "checkerboard" pattern of alternating ownership by the state [Montana] and Great Northern [Properties]. The two parties have an agreement to jointly develop the coal.

The Otter Creek tracts were given to the state [Montana] by the federal government in 2002, as part of a federally brokered deal to shut down the New World gold mine proposed near Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s. The Otter Creek tracts were intended as compensation for revenues the state would have received from the gold mine.