With two friends, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, the brothers formed the Kelly Gang, which robbed banks, took over whole towns, and terrorized the people of Victoria and New South Wales for two years.

[2]: 74  They had seven children: Annie (1853), Edward "Ned" (1854), Maggie (1856), James (1859), Dan (1861), Kate (1862) and Grace (1863).

[2]: 75  Dan's father died in 1866, and in 1867, his mother, Ellen Kelly, moved the family to a small farm near Greta in northeast Victoria.

[3]: 30 Ellen Kelly's two sisters, Catherine and Jane Lloyd, were living at Greta, and her two brothers, John and James Quinn, had moved to the area in 1864.

He and his brother James, aged 12, were arrested by Constable Flood for riding a horse that did not belong to them.

In 1875, like many other young men in northeast Victoria, Dan Kelly and his cousins, the Lloyds, went to New South Wales to look for seasonal farm work in the Riverina area and on the Monaro High Plains.

[3]: 52  They were charged with violent assault, damage to property (the door), breaking into houses and stealing things worth £113.

[3]: 52  In court, the police were not able to prove most of the charges, but Dan went to prison for one month for damaging property worth £10.

Dan Kelly had built small huts some time earlier on Bullock Creek, where he had cleared an area of about 20 acres (8 ha) to keep horses.

[4] During the months they were hiding at Bullock Creek, they were often visited by their friends including Steve Hart, Joe Byrne, Aaron Sherritt and the Lloyds.

They set up a camp at an abandoned diggings at Stringybark Creek in a thickly forested area.

Ned and Dan, and friends Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, went to the police camp and told them to surrender.

[2]: 100 The Victorian government passed a law on 30 October 1878, making the Kelly Gang outlaws; they no longer had any legal rights.

They locked the town's policemen in the police station cells and kept many people hostage in the Royal Mail Hotel for three days.

They knew that Joe Byrne's friend, Aaron Sherritt, had been giving information to the police.

[2]: 156  This meant that the news of the murder did not reach Melbourne as quickly as the Kelly Gang had hoped.

Ned organised music and Dan joined in dancing to keep the people in the hotel entertained.

[3]: 160  Dan wanted to leave Glenrowan when they knew the plan was not going to work because the train was late.

[2]: 158  The police quickly left the train and placed themselves around the hotel so that the Kelly Gang was trapped inside.

He would not let Dan's sister Maggie, or a Catholic priest, Father Gibney, go into the hotel to tell the men to give themselves up.

[2]: 162  He found Dan Kelly and Steve Hart dead in a back room of the hotel.

People who saw the burned and blackened bodies were only able to tell which was Dan Kelly and which was Steve Hart by their size.

[2]: 159–163 Family members, including his sisters, Kate and Maggie, and friends took the bodies back to Greta.

[3]: 208  Dan Kelly and Steve Hart were buried in unmarked graves at Greta, on 30 June 1880.

[2]: 164  About 100 people were at the funeral, with Dan's cousin Tom Lloyd as the undertaker, and a Greta farmer, Daniel O'Keefe, acting as a preacher.

Despite his body being identified by police and a priest before being burnt, there have also been stories that both Dan and Steve survived the fire.

In 2001, scientists took a small piece of bone from the grave of Charles Devine Tindall at Toowoomba, Queensland, to see if they could find DNA to prove he was Dan Kelly.

[21] An archaeological dig at the site of the hotel by Adam Ford in 2008 found that there was no cellar or other hiding place under the floors.

[23] In October 1902, a Melbourne newspaper printed a story that Dan Kelly and Steve Hart were living in South Africa,[24] where the men allegedly fought in the Boer War.

Another man, Jim Davis from Darra (a suburb of Brisbane, Queensland), said in 1938 that he was Dan Kelly.