dmarkey did you find the answer? If you install the ESP board into the Arduino IDE using the board manager, you’ll see a bunch of examples. There is one called “WIFIClient” under “ESP8266WIFI”
look at the section titled “Installing with Boards Manager” https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino
Yes you have to manually create the HTTP strings which is a bit of a pain, but not too difficult once you get used to it. The thing that I found a bit of the pain was dealing with urlencoding. I made an example that hasnt’ been added to the library yet to simplify url encoding. look here: https://github.com/zenmanenergy/ESP8266-Arduino-Examples