Cody married Louisa Frederici on March 6, 1866, just a few days after his twentieth birthday. The couple met when Cody had traveled to St. Louis under his command during the Civil War. Cody's "Autobiography" barely mentioned the courtship to Frederici but declared, "I now adored her above any other young lady I had ever seen." Cody suggested in letters and his autobiography that Frederici had pestered him into marriage, but he was aware that it was "very smart to be engaged." This rhetoric became pushed more and more in his explanations for marriage as the relationship between him and his wife began to decline.