Quantrill had a party of about 400 when he made his raid on Lawrence, in the heart of Jayhawker country.
There are several eyewitness reports, the following is an excerpt from Edward P. Farren, whose family lived in the Stone house at the time. These personal family websites can disappear at any time. Of course, it only deals with those events which were witnessed by the observer.
Quantrill had taught school in Lawrence, and had contracted typhoid fever there. He had been taken care of by the Stone's at their house. Quantrill assured all in the house that they would be safe.
The raiders were taking prisoners to the City Hotel. A party of sharpshooters, formed in the weeks before the raid, were shooting at the raiders.
Prisoners were brought to the house.
Quantrill and a lot of his raiders were at the house at the time, and they said to the people there, "If you can't stop those fellows shooting over the River, they will kill everybody." Some of the women went upstairs and waved sheets...for them to stop.
Lydia Stone came in and ran upstairs . Two rebels came to the door asking "Where is she?"
[During the raid, many of the raiders had become drunk and were stealing and shooting at will].
They could not find her, and demanded that everyone there come outside. Earlier, they had taken her diamond ring, and she had complained to Quantrill, who made them give it back. Now they wanted to get even. The raiders lined everyone up on the veranda, men, women and children. They asked the man on the end where he was from. He gave answer and they shot him. .... Several others were shot .... Mr. Stone came up and said "Look here, I have been guaranteed protection..." They shot him.
Those at the house made a break and ran towards the ferry. They managed to get on, with others who had been hiding, and escaped to North Lawrence.
http://personal.riverusers.com/~jdf/civilwar/quantrell.html

Re comments about the popularization of Quantrill, John Newman Edwards wrote in the Kansas City Times, 1872:

"It is useless to declare that these kind of characters do not attract. All Paris came to see Cartouche hung, and yet Cartouche was only a robber. But then his little child was suspended on the same scaffold. In the Arsenel at Jefferson City is a picture of Bill Anderson, taken after death.... For hours women gather about this picture and babble of balls and revels and dances and battles, and ever and ever come back...."
"No nation equals the individuality of the American. Her people possess all the elements to make the finest soldiers on earth. Keen. desperate, enduring, insatiate for the excitement of active conflict, and readily hardened into reckless butchers, they make conscience subsidiary to slaughter, and accept the fortunes of a struggle with a fatalism that is Oriental. As a perfect type of this, Quantrill will live as a model Sooner or later he knew death would come, and so he forgot him. Meanwhile his killing went on, and his exploits filled a historic page of the gigantic contest."
http://www.civilwarstlouis.com/History2/edwardsquantrill.htm