Brothels were nearly impossible to escape from as their controlling owners fostered a competitive atmosphere between prostitutes, and they were given little food. The times were synonymous with gunfights, heavy drinking, gun-toting outlaws, sheriffs and solitary men on horseback.
These rare pictures - taken around the turn of the 19th century - show "soiled doves", women in white dresses who came to boom towns such as Denver to keep the working men company.
Other photos feature the infamous bordellos, showing madams, men, women, maids and even babies having a time of it in the Wild West. The highly mythologised American Frontier saw economic workers traipsing out the Western states of the Union in search of lucrative work.
Boom towns and villages that struck gold became magnets for prospectors who would then flock to a town to work on the mine. And where men went, women would follow. A girl of "easy virtue" could make good money by keeping the workers company.
One is demure, and befitting of an American lady of those times, while the other depicts a wild look while wearing the symbolic white dress. Although it is impossible to determine the reason for Shears' different images, one possibility is that one portrait was for her family back home, and the other for business purposes.
