 In her forties and after her husband's death in 1888, she trained to become a nurse in Chicago at Illinois Training School for Nurses (program merged in 1926 into the University of Chicago's School of Nursing and ceased to exist in 1929).Graduating in 1891 McMaster left Chicago to work at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles and Children's Home, an orphanage in Schenectady, New York.She later returned to Chicago, where she died in 1903.