716
Opinion of the Court
then Valley could recover from McCone the fees McCone improperly collected. It would make scant sense, the court reasoned, to hold instead that Valley should "exact the . . . license fee anew from the [vehicle] owner, leaving the latter to his remedy, if any, for the illegal exaction." Id., at 385- 386, 97 P. 2d, at 366.
As the District Court in this case correctly recognized, App. to Pet. for Cert. 49-50, the Valley County pattern is not the one presented here. There, the Montana licensing statute bound both counties. One, and not the other, was the sole subdivision authorized to issue the license and collect the fee. Here, as Cotton Petroleum makes plain, neither the State nor the Tribe enjoys authority to tax to the total exclusion of the other. Moreover, dispositively distancing the Tribe's situation from that of the prevailing subdivision in Valley County, the Tribe itself could not have taxed lessee Westmoreland during the period in question, for the Interior Department (whether wrongly or rightly) had withheld the essential permission.
It bears repetition that the Department did not approve the Tribe's imposition of a coal tax on ceded strip production until September 1982, see supra, at 705, that the Tribe never sought judicial review of the Department's pre-1982 disapprovals, see supra, at 703-704, that Westmoreland would pay no tax to the Tribe absent Department approval, see supra, at 706, 710, 713, n. 13, that Montana's taxes did not impede the Tribe from gaining the Department's clearance, see supra, at 710, and that Montana received no share of the post-1982 tax payments released from the District Court's registry, see supra, at 705-707. These were factors the District Court correctly considered significant in holding disgorgement an exorbitant, and therefore inequitable, remedy.16
16 In view of the evidence diligently canvassed by the District Court, including the Tribe-Westmoreland 1982 agreement that Westmoreland would have no tax liability to the Tribe for the 1976-1982 period, see
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