I wired everything up and got the Ethernet shield to power up with no problems I even see activity on it. But not from the D1 mini. I compile the example for the ethernet with no errors. The problem I ran into was I'm not sure if the wiring is correct from the D1 mini to the Ethernet shield. Can anyone confirm if this is correct?
EDIT: sorry, you meant D11 to D13 on the Ethernet shield. D11 to D13 are not connected on Arduino Ethernet shield (but maybe are on the Wiznet clone). use the SPI header of the shield and pin 10 for CS
power the shield from the 5 V pin of D1 mini to the 5 V pin of the shield. the io signal level of the shield is 3.3 V so ok for the esp8266
CS pin on the shield is pin 10. on the SPI master side (Wemos D1 mini) you can use any suitable pin and set it to library with the init function before begin of course. begin communicates with the shield is at has to know which pin to use as CS.
That worked. The problem I was having the whole time was the CS pin. I couldn't understand why I wasn't having any network or able to pin to the it. Thank you very much for all the help.