"Salvage" is a short story by American writer Orson Scott Card, originally published in the February 1986 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.
When he hears a couple of truck drivers talking about some gold hidden in a Mormon temple in the now flooded Salt Lake City he decides to go and look for it.
When they arrive at the temple Deaver dives down into the building and comes up with some pieces of metal which he believes to be the hidden gold.
When he gets to the surface, he finds out that they are prayers that people have scratched into flattened tin cans and thrown into the temple windows.
In Card's story "West", Deaver Teague was found by a group of traveling Mormons after his parents were killed.