A nearly two-year-old fight between a local businessman and the multinational corporate owner of an International Falls paper mill is distorting wood prices in northern Minnesota, upsetting other loggers and causing anxiety in the city as the mill's workforce shrinks. t a recent timber auction in the small town of Cotton, bidding for rights to harvest a 109-acre tract of Minnesota aspen soared to three times the appraised value, and that wasn't the end of it.