In the late 19th century it was thought to refer to the Black River of modern-day Lorain County.
[1] In 1755, 18-year-old James Smith was captured from Pennsylvania by indigenous American Iroquois, and brought to live with their nation in Northern Ohio.
Smith recorded that this river was "about 8 miles east of Sandusky" and "interlocks with the West Branch of the Muskingum".
But Smith also wrote, of the "Canesadooharie", that it had a "falls", "12 to 15 feet high, and nearly perpendicular", which the modern Huron River does not possess.
The likelihood is that the single falls which Smith experienced over a period of many weeks in 1756, "12 to 15 feet high, and nearly perpendicular", i.e. high and very steep rapids, was somewhere in the vicinity of (now) Norwalk, Ohio; and by the mid-1800s, nature had probably reduced them to being more like actual rapids, than a "falls".